Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire 0299133400, 0299133443

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The University of Wisconsin—Madison 1988

To honor the distinguished historian Merle Curti,

lectures in social and intellectual history were inaugurated in 1976 under the sponsorship of the University of Wisconsin Foundation and the Department of History of the University of Wisconsin—Madison PUBLISHED

BY THE UNIVERSITY

OF WISCONSIN

PRESS

Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the

English Revolution (1980) Carlo M. Cipolla, Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy (1981)

James Willard Hurst, Law and Markets in United States History:

Different Modes of Bargaining among Interests (1982) Gordon A. Craig, The End of Prussia (1984)

Michael Kammen, Spheres of Liberty: Changing PerceptionsofLiberty in American Culture (1986)

Paul Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (1989)

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B16 119

Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity ‘Towards a Christian Empire

PETER

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UNIVERSITY

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RCHOOL OF 7 -IEOLOG REGheeMOoON® Go

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The University of Wisconsin Press

114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 1992 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved By ie ele es Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Peter Robert Lamont.

Power and persuasion in late antiquity: towards a Christian empire / Peter Brown. 192 pp. cm, — (The Curti lectures ; 1988) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-13340-0 ISBN 0-299-13344-3 (pbk.) 1. Rome—Politics and government— 284-476. 2. Rome—Social conditions. 3. Upper classes—Rome—History. I. Title. II. Series. DG311.B76 1992 937'06 —dc20 92-50245

Contents

Preface

vii

1. Devotio: Autocracy and Elites 3 35 2. Paideia and Power 3. Poverty and Power 7A 4. Towards a Christian Empire 118 Index

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Preface

It was a great honor for me to have been invited to deliver the Curti Lectures for 1988 and an undiluted joy to find myself once again in Madison, Wisconsin, beside quiet waters and among friends, colleagues, and heroes

of long standing. Not the least of these pleasures was to make the acquaintance of Merle Curti and to offer, through this narrative of a distant age, some tribute to the humane values which he has always maintained in the study of modern America. The reader should know that these four long chapters grew out of the three lectures delivered at that time and that the three lectures themselves marked only the beginning of a process of self-education which, I very much hope, will continue for many years beyond the publication of this book. The book must be read in this light. It is an essay, with all the tentativeness, even the lopsidedness, that goes with such an endeavor. And it is an essay written largely to help myself, my readers, and future students of the later Roman Empire to catch up on certain themes in the political, cultural, and religious history of the time, on which a large body of modern scholarship now exists. The exciting consequences of much of this scholarship have not been appreciated as fully as they might be. For this reason, I have chosen to write this essay in the form of a synthesis. It is an account of certain aspects of the period between A.D. 300 and a.p. 450, written in the light of recent advances in the field. I have tried to place the traditional culture of the upper classes in a social and political context which gives somewhat greater weight than has been given hitherto to its continued relevance and Vii

viii

Preface

implicit goals. I have also attempted to link the increased persuasive power of the Christian bishops not only to the emergence of a novel, Christian image of society—for which we have abundant evidence—but also to social developments in the late Roman cities, whose outlines we can trace

only in a fragmentary manner. Readers must know the tentativeness of some of the connections that are advanced in this book between various cultural, religious, and social

phenomena. But they should also take heart. For almost every aspect of this period, newly discovered sources, the exploitation of sources hitherto ignored, and the skillful reinterpretation of evidence long taken for granted have opened the way to a new view of the period that saw the final triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the foundation of the Byzantine Empire, and the decline and fall of the empire in the West. It is profoundly reassuring to work in a field among scholars who have questioned and replaced so many standard generalizations and familiar narratives in recent years. If I were to sum up in a nutshell the changes in the historiography of the late Roman Empire that have affected my own presentation in these chapters, I would say that we are better informed about and also considerably more sensitive to the religious and cultural expectations with which late Roman persons approached the political, administrative, and social developments of their time. It is as if a lunar landscape whose outlines once stood out with unearthly clarity in standard accounts of the political and administrative changes of the age has taken on softer tints, because it is now bathed in an atmosphere heavy with hopes and fears rooted in the religious and cultural traditions of the participants. If my account has recaptured some of the ways in which educated contemporaries reacted to, exploited, and presented to themselves the many dramatic developments that took place in the fourth and fifth centuries a.p., I will be content. If it persuades others that this can be done, and done better than in this essay, I will be delighted. For these reasons, I have tried wherever possible, in my footnotes, to

do justice to the most up-to-date scholarship on the subjects that I consider. I have cited sources that are difficult of access or little known with full references to editions, whether these are the most modern or, as is

frequently the case, the most widely available standard editions. Most notable are the Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina, edited by J. P. Migne in his Patrologiae cursus completus (Paris, 1844 onwards). To support my arguments, I have deliberately chosen, whenever possible, to cite passages

from works of authors for which translations and commentaries in English or French exist. This is particularly the case with the extensive works and

letters of Libanius of Antioch, whom I cite from the edition of R. Férster,

Preface

ix

Libanius: Opera, vols. 1-11 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903-22), giving, between parentheses, the volume number of that edition in roman and the page in arabic numerals. Other well-known authors I have cited in references that are standard in most works on ancient history. The reader should have little difficulty in tracing these to standard editions and to reliable translations. The Res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, in particular, is edited and

translated in the Loeb Classical Library, by J. C. Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952-56). W. Hamilton,

Ammianus Marcellinus: The Later Roman Empire (A.D. 354-378) (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1986), provides a more recent, slightly abridged,

translation. In this process of self-education, I have been more than fortunate in the help I have received. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to travel throughout the late Roman sites of Turkey and Syria. I would not like it to be forgotten that the absorption of whole landscapes once central to the history of early Christianity and of the eastern empire was only possible because of those innumerable persons—Turks, Syrians, and exiles from Palestine —whose rare courtesy, skill, and, at times, high-spirited

courage made travel possible in remote regions. The few days that I spent at Aphrodisias in Caria remain, in a way, the imaginative core of the book. A late classical city was brought alive to me—as to so many scholars in this generation—through the rare generosity of a uniquely vivid and uncompromising host, the late Kenan Erim. I would wish him to be remembered as he lies now in the city that he loved, whose unequaled riches he has unlocked for so many. Colleagues at Princeton University, especially those in the history department, contributed at almost every stage to the slow and difficult process by which the insights of the first draft of these lectures became chastened and gathered weight, through an increasing sense of the complexity of the social and political life of the later empire. The meetings of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, then under the directorship of Lawrence Stone, gave me almost weekly food for thought throughout 1988-89 on issues tantalizingly close to those with which I found myself forced to grapple. But ultimately, the manuscript owes most to fellow scholars in my own field. Charlotte Roueché and Garth Fowden read and reread drafts in such a way as not only to add a wealth of further information, such as only they were able to provide, but also to alter, quite decisively, the perspectives and the balance of the study as a whole. At the end, Judith Herrin’s apposite criticisms helped me to bring greater cohesion to a story which could easily have fallen apart into its constituent themes, handled as they are in separate chapters. With candor, generosity, and patience, these readers have made the book what it is on a far deeper level than merely pro-

x

Preface

viding erudite information or removing superficial blemishes: the constant challenge of their friendship stands between it and earlier, less satisfactory drafts. The manuscript would not have beenprepared so quickly or with such ease if I had not turned to Olga Savin, who proved to be not only adept at word processing but also an exceptionally alert reader of my text. The index I owe to the intelligence and industry of Beatrice Caseau. Last of all, I would like to thank my wife, Betsy. She has shared, with unfailing cheerfulness about their outcome, both the disruptions of travel and the tiresome and quotidian dislocations occasioned by the work that turned three lectures, delivered with an easy heart and in good company, into a book whose efforts to survey a complex and rapidly changing field may be of some use, I hope, to students of the later empire and so prove worthy of a lecture series delivered in the university where none other than Michael Rostovtzeff began his American career.

Power and Persuasion

in Late Antiquity

ta

ey ee, a ®

CHAPTER

¥

ONE

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

This is a book about one aspect of the control of power in the later Roman Empire. It attempts to describe the expectations with which upper-class subjects approached the emperor and his representatives, to ward off the cruelty and fiscal rigor that characterized the government of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries a.p. It will not describe all the mechanisms by which such approaches were made, nor all the strategies employed: rather, it will concentrate on the cultural and religious elements v that were thought to have played a role in making the imperial power, for all its domineering majesty, amenable to persuasion. The first chapter will offer a brief sketch of the social and administrative setting within which the power of the emperor normally made itself felt among those who wished to temper its impact. It will stress the extent “” to which the imperial administration, though greatly strengthened in comparison with previous centuries, still needed to make sure of the collabora-

tion of the upper classes in the cities and provinces if its demands were to be effectively implemented. The structural weakness of the central government made it essential that the devotio, the loyal support, of a wide and varied constituency of local notables should be actively engaged. This led to the elaboration of a language of power and to occasional gestures of grace and favor that kept a place, in the midst of a hard-dealing system of government, for expectations that the emperor and his local representatives could be persuaded to act according to norms upheld by spokesmen of the upper classes. The second chapter will examine the traditional culture of the upper Be)

4

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

classes, as this was imparted to them through the system of education that

went by the name of paideia. It will attempt to measure the role of this culture in creating common ground among all members of the upper classes, the rulers and the ruled alike, and in elaborating exacting codes of courtesy and self-control, linked to the ideal of a benevolent, because cultivated,

exercise of authority. The prevalence of ideals associated with paideia explains a further feature of the political imagination of the age—the repeated references to a persuasive role exercised by the philosopher. In reality, philosophers tended to be peripheral figures on the political scene in late antiquity; some, indeed, were fierce recluses, proud of their ability to avoid all contact with public life. Yet the late antique philosopher had been empowered by long tradition to act as the disinterested adviser, even as the critic, of the power-

ful. He had been assigned a clearly written character-part in the drama of persuasion, even if this part was frequently left unplayed or was played only by ceremonious yes-men of little real authority. The third chapter will consider the social changes within the late Roman cities that led to the emergence of representatives of Christianity in an arena that had previously been considered the exclusive preserve of the traditional upper classes. In the last decades of the fourth century, bishops and monks showed that they could sway the will of the powerful as effectively as had any philosopher. B They were, in many ways, disturbingly new protagonists.But they had been able to make their debut on thestage of late Roman politics because contemporaries needed them to act according to scripts that had been written, in previous centuries, by men of paideia.\An upper-class bishop such as Ambrose, at Milan, and even a wild man of the Syrian hilltops such as the hermit Macedonius, at Antioch, acted as effectively as they did because N

they found roles into which they could step with confidence. They were “true” philosophers. They played the ancient part of the courageous and free-spoken man of wisdom, but in playing this ancient role they invested it with a heavy charge of novel meaning. The strong religious overtones associated with their interventions brought a new world of values, characterized by belief in supernatural sanctions, into a system of control that had, until then, remained resolutely profane. The most urgent concern of those who “had been formed through paideia’” had been with the selfgrooming of a governing class according to classical notions of deportment.1 The bishops and monks, by contrast, spoke of the wrath and mercy of a new, high God. The intrusion of the supernatural betrayed the presence of more than 1.

Libanius, Ep 994.2 (X1.124).

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

5

new beliefs: another element had entered the politics of the empire. The Y emperor’s willingness to listen to bishops, as he had once listened to philosophers, implied his recognition of new forms of local power. This power Could wear a sinister face: its non-Christian victims spoke of it, accurately enough, as a “usurped authority.” The unauthorized demolition of major shrines of the old religion, unpunished attacks on Jewish synagogues, and, finally, the lynching of a leading member of the prestigious town council of Alexandria, the woman philosopher Hypatia, in 415, were acts of violence that showed that the cities themselves had changed. They had fallen, in part, into the hands of new, nontraditional leaders, and their inhabitants

sought redress for their grievances in novel, frequently more threatening, forms of direct action. The fourth chapter, therefore, concludes the book with a description v of the elaboration, in Christian literature, of a new language of power\* and, so, of a new rationale for its control that reflected the balance be-—

tween imperial autocracy, civic notables, and the Christian church in the fifth-century eastern empire. Throughout the book, the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire will hold the center of attention. From the Danube to the Euphrates, and from the Black Sea to as far south as the upper Nile and westward to Cyrenaica, in an area that now embraces the territories of no less than ten modern states (Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania south of the Danube, in Europe, along with Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and Libya, in the Middle East), the ruling classes of what was, in the last analysis, av

mighty confederation of regions prided themselves on sharing a common Greek culture and were expected to exhibit strenuous loyalty to a theoretically undivided Roman Empire. This last was hardly ever the case. For thirteen years, between Constantine’s conquest of the eastern provinces in 324 to his death in 337, and then for only another seven years in all, from that time to the death of Theodosius I, in 395, the eastern and western

parts of the empire were united under the rule of a single emperor. Usually, up to 395, and invariably from then onwards, the eastern provinces

were ruled by an emperor who, either by agreement or because he had no option, allowed a western colleague to control the Latin-speaking provinces of the empire, from Britain to the present-day frontiers of Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania.

By concentrating on the eastern provinces, the book will do no more than respect the contours of a division within the Roman world that was already transparent in the fourth century and that became definitive in the 2.

Eunapius, Lives ofthe Sophists 472, in Philostratus and Eunapius, ed. and trans. W. C.

Wright, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 422.

6

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

fifth with the collapse of the western empire and the emergence of a specifically East Roman state, the predecessor of what we call the Byzantine Empire.


,

Weal

ee

By the fourth century A.D. it was obvious that all this had changed. In the second and early third centuries the autonomous mints of the cities of Asia Minor had issued coins which dwelt lovingly on the particularities of local cult sites and on the honors paid by the emperors to local deities.46 With the rise of the Sassanian Empire and its rapid conquests throughout the eastern provinces, these delightfully old-fashioned scenes gave way to a single, brutally simplified image: the emperor now stood alone on the coins of the cities, triumphing over Persian barbarians. By A.D. 275 the civic mints of the Greek world had ceased to function.47 Nor could these

be

cities any longer consider themselves as roughly equal to each other. Only those cities which won a favored place as métropolis of their province, that

is, as centers of imperial the empire, were certain perceptibly in status and All cities of the eastern 43.

power in the new administrative geography of to enjoy continued prosperity. The others sunk in self-esteem.48 provinces came to take second place to Constan-

R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: A. Knopf, 1987), 12-14, 53-61,

82; M. Wérrle, Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien Vestigia 39 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 254-57; Stephen Mitchell, “Festivals, Games and Civic Life in Roman Asia

Minor,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 183-93. 44. The Philogelés; or, Laughter-Lover 49, trans. B. Baldwin (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben,

1983), 9. 45.

Fergus Millar, “Empire and City, Augustus to Julian: Obligations, Excuses and

Status,” Journal of Roman Studies 73 (1983): 87-90; Worrle, Stadt und Fest, 62-66. 46. Kenneth Harl, Civic Coins and Civic Politics in the Roman East, A.D. 185-275 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 52-70, plates 22-29; David S. Potter, Prophecy and History in the Crisis of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 195-96;

Peter Hermann, Hilferufe aus rmischen Provinzen: Ein Aspekt der Krise des rémischen Reiches im 3. Jht. n. Chr, Sitzungsberichte der Joachim-Jungius Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Hamburg, 8 (1990), no. 4 (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1990). 47. 48.

Harl, Civic Coins and Civic Politics, 89-92, plate 16. Roueché, Floreat Perge, 218-21.

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

19

tine’s new city, Constantinople. Although the court did not reside there on a permanent basis until after 395, the inauguration of Constantinople

in 330 and the rapid expansion of an eastern senatorial order, recruited from among the notables of Greek provincial cities, in the subsequent reign of Constantius II ensured that even a métropolis with the prestige of Antioch no longer offered to those who served on its own town council status and privilege equal to that now obtainable at Constantinople. All over the Greek East, success at the court of the emperor meant escape from the demands of one’s hometown: “In the end, the Empire and its constituent

cities were in direct and continuous competition for the same human and financial resources.”49

Constantine’s condemnation of sacrifice and the closing and spoliation “” of many temples further undermined the cultural autonomy of the cities.5° The local notables found themselves denied the right to resort to precisely those religious ceremonials that had once enabled each city to give public expression to its own sense of identity. It was no longer considered advisable to sacrifice, to visit temples, or to celebrate one’s city as the dwellingplace of particular gods bound to the civic community by particular, local rites. Instead, the Christian court offered a new, empire-wide patriotism.”

This was centered on the person and mission of a God-given, universal” ruler, whose vast and profoundly abstract care for the empire as a whole made the older loyalties to individual cities, that had been wholeheartedly expressed in the old, polytheistic system, seem parochial and trivial.5! On the local level, the most obvious result of this abrupt centralization: of power was a fracturing of the elite. For as long as the empire had been a distant presence, it had been possible to delegate the business of government in each city to a relatively homogeneous class of urban notables: they alone were considered to be in control of their little world. The fourth v century saw increased infighting among members of the local elites. Different groups derived their status in the locality from differing sources. We see this most clearly in the case of Antioch. No longer the sole patrons of the peasantry, urban landowners found that they had to compete with military men for the obedience of the prosperous villages of the Orontes valley.52 In Antioch itself, retired imperial officials allied with leading no49.

Millar, “Empire and City,” 96.

50.

T.D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1981), 211-12, 246-47; Kenneth Hazrl, “Sacrifice and Pagan Belief in Fifth- and Sixth-

Century Byzantium,” Past and Present 128 (1990): 7-26. 51. G. Dagron, “L’Empire romain d’Orient au ive. siécle et les traditions politiques de l’Hellénisme: Le témoignage de Thémistius,” Travaux et Mémoires 3 (1968): 35-82. 52. Peter Garnsey and Greg Wolf, “Patronage of the Rural Poor in the Roman World,” Patronage in Ancient Society, ed. A. Wallace-Hadrill (New York: Routledge, 1990), 163-64;

20

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

tables, who owed their status to collaboration with the imperial government, in order to victimize their less fortunate colleagues on the town / council.53 Many notables flouted the traditional Greek culture of their city by leaving Antioch to learn Latin and, Roman law in the schools of Bei/ rut.54 A town council whose original unity had been splintered was challenged by the rise of a new pressure group associated with the Christian bishop and with the violent monks of Syria.55 Not surprisingly, such developments forced the rhetor Libanius, a man whose ancestors’ portraits still hung in the town hall of Antioch, to wax “tiresome” in his old age.5¢ It is a tribute to Libanius’ skill as a writer that his vivid narrative of the discontents of his beloved Antioch has been accepted, by most scholars, as conclusive evidence for the sure operation of an irreversible decline of urban life throughout the eastern empire.5” “L’avénement du byzantinisme,”5® the emergence of a “Byzantine” style of government centered on the person of the emperor and based on the outright social dominance of Constantinople over all other cities, is accepted by almost all scholars as the most clearly documented, indeed, as the most inevitable, development in the Greek East in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.5° In the long run, the effect on the cities of the changes that we have described was as drastic as that which accompanied the absorption of former Italian communes into the absolutist, territorial states of post-Renaissance Italy: what sense of local identity remained in these cities came to be maintained in profoundly different circumstances. Yet if we are to study the expectations of those who lived through such changes, we must avoid the temptation of hindsight. It is important to recapJ. M. Carrié, “Patronage et propriété militaires au ive. siécle,” Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 100 (1976): 159-76. 53. Libanius, Oratio 48.41 (III.448), in Libanius: Selected Works 2, ed. and trans. A. F. Norman, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 456; Petit, Libanius, 269-94; Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 174-92. 54.

Libanius, Oratio 2.44, 49.29 (1.253, III.466), in Norman, Libanius 2, 34, 484; Petit,

Libanius, 363-66; A. J. Festugiére, Antioche paienne et chrétienne, Bibliothéque des écoles frangaises d’Athénes et de Rome 194 (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1959), 410-12; Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 242-55. 55.

Libanius, Oratio 2.32, 30.8-11 (1.249, III.91-93), in Norman, Libanius 2, 26, 106-

10; Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 224-42. 56. Libanius, Oratio 2.10 (1.242), in Norman, Libanius 2, 14. 57. Petit, Libanius, 291-93, 356. M. Forlin Patrucco and D. Vera, in “Crisi di potere

e autodifesa di classe: Aspetti del tradizionalismo delle aristocrazie,” in Societd romana e impero tardoantico 1: Istituzioni, ceti, economie, ed. A. Giardina (Bari: Laterza, 1986), 252-59, suggest an alternative interpretation. 58. Petit, Libanius, 293.

59.

Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1978), 32-33.

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

21

ture a little of the contingent nature of local politics in the fourth-century empire. Let us conclude, then, with sketching some of the advantages which ” the local elites still expected to enjoy, even in the changed circumstances of the fourth century. The eastern empire remained an urban civilization. To enter a late Roman city in the Greek East was an impressive experience. The city was a place

of “delights” whose ancient monuments continued to amaze and charm the visitor.© In Ephesus, for example, the theater, where Saint Paul had

once stood, still towered at the end of the carefully maintained arcade leading up from the harbor; its “immense circle” radiated civic “delight” at the actions of a late Roman governor who had built retaining walls to support its venerable fabric.1 Access to imperial funds and to transport” facilities and the ability to impose forced labor on the peasantry ensured that it was the governor, not local notables, who did most to bring “‘the

many veins of glistening stone” into a fourth-century city.® Imperial ofh-“” cials replaced private benefactors in fulfilling the ancient urge to act as “founder” of public buildings and as the “benefactor” and “savior” of one’s city.63 But the governors’ activities affected only the ancient monumental” facade of the city. They were more than balanced, in the fourth century, by the splendid development of new private palaces. As we can see from the case of Antioch, the mosaics of these palaces still spoke of the civic generosity of their owners, and their facades (especially if decorated with columns appropriated from public buildings, such as temples*) contributed to the beauty of the city quite as effectively as did work undertaken by a governor.® In normal times, the city continued to be the preferred place of residencev for the notables of the province. When Libanius described his own life as a man about town—exchanging courtesies with shopkeepers on his way through the market, keeping up his bedside visits to sick friends despite attacks of the gout, and dutifully attending their funerals®*—he took for granted that he shared with his readers an urban style of sociability that did not, as yet, admit an imaginative alternative, even in a considerably less urbanized region such as Cyrenaica.®? 60.

Expositio totius mundi et gentium 26, 32, 38, ed. J. Rougé, Sources chrétiennes 124

(Paris: Le Cerf, 1966), 160, 164, 174, with commentary on pp. 245-46. 61. Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity, 61; Louis Robert, Hellenica 4 (1948): 87-88. 62. Codex Theodosianus 10.19.2; Libanius, Oratio 48.38, 50.16-23 (III.447, 478-81), in Norman, Libanius 2, 454, 72-78. 63. Petit, Libanius, 291-93; Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 132-36; Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity, 27-29; Roques, Synésios de Cyrene, 134.

64. Libanius, Ep 724.1 (X.650). 65. 66.

67.

Petit, Libanius, 381-82. Libanius, Oratio 2.6, 22, 50 (1.240, 246, 255), in Norman, Libanius 2, 12, 22, 38.

Roques, Synésios de Cyrene, 135-38; see esp. J. Ch. Balty, “Notes sur l’habitat

22

Devotio: Autocracy and Elites

Installed in their cities, the upper echelons of provincial society met ar// riving governors less as inferiors than as equals. Precisely because of the centralization of the empire, the local governors, sent out at regular intervals to the 104 provinces of the empire,enjoyed relatively little prestige and could show little initiative. They held office for short periods, frequently, v

/

as in the case of the consularis of Syria, resident at Antioch, for less than

a year.68 They wielded a minimum of coercive power. The armies were stationed on frontiers far from most civilian provinces and were subject to an independent, military chain of command. Despite imperial laws to the contrary, the governor’s permanent staff, his officium, was run by locals.® A governor was as effective as his staff allowed him to be, and the venality and inertia of the officia were legendary. Any attempt to ensure that governors obeyed laws issued by the emperors included sanctions against their officia for conniving at abuses and for disregarding imperial edicts.70 A member of the governor’s officium enjoyed far less status than did an average town councillor. Notables might be browbeaten by a governor, but Libanius expected his readers to agree that it was an intolerable failure to inspire deference on the notable’s part if he gave way to a mere governor’s official.71 Furthermore, the very process by which the imperial government had altered the social structure of the local elites undermined the power of the emperor’s representatives. Even in small cities, imperial honors, obtained directly from the court, conferred protection on their holders. The eccentric Count Joseph, settled at Scythopolis in Palestine, weathered the dis


125.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 15.8.16.

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Paideia and Power

the form of “Kremlin-watching” most appropriate to an age of personal power. Gregory Nazianzen, a Christian, had met the young Julian at Athens Y and had drawn his own conclusions. Those restless eyes, that heavy breathing through the nose, the shuffling gait, and the uncontrolled bursts of laughter were ominous signs. Here was a young man on whom the benign immunization of paideia would not take.!?©Christians should beware of

such a man as emperor. Reading the pages of the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote his Latin history of the empire in Rome in the 390s, we find ourselves scanning the faces of the great with frightened eyes. He offers us a sinister physiognomics of power. What Arnaldo Momigliano once characterized as the “acute, almost demonic perception” betrayed in his works is disturb’ ing because it is so grippingly visual.127 The fatal tendency to anger in Valentinian I, for instance, was increasingly shown in the details of his “voice, expression and style of walk.’!28 For Ammianus judged the actions of contemporaries against the tranquil, almost iconic image of the public man associated with the proper exercise of power. In his history, anger was “recorded almost always when displayed by supposedly civilized men”; “burning, seething, swelling” were his favored terms.12° The figures in his account were grotesquely contorted by the qualities that flouted Ammianus’ ideals. Extravagant sweeps of the arm, prancing steps, eyebrows raised like horns, head swung back like a tossing bull, eyes that flashed with lethal rage, and the smile fixed on the face of the chief interrogator, “like the snarl of a wild beast”: Ammianus wrote of these, and in this graphic manner, to remind his cultivated readers of the nightmare into which persons like themselves had fallen in recent years. 130 It is a dramatic shadow play from whose pages modern readers have derived an unforgettable impression of the cruelty, venality, and panic-fear that could surround the late Roman autocracy.131 Yet we must remember that, as in a shadow play, these horrific incidents loom in such extravagant shapes because they were thrown onto the screen by the bright and carefully tilted s

126. Gregory Nazianzen, 689B-692B, 717A.

Orationes

4.56,

5.21-23,

34: Patrologia Graeca

35:560B,

127. A.D. Momigliano, “The Lonely Historian Ammianus Marcellinus,” Annali della Scuola Normale superiore di Pisa, ser. 3, 4 (1974): 1404, now in Essays in Ancient and Modern

Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 136; Matthews, Roman Empire of Ammianus, 258-62, 459-60.

128. 129.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 29.3.2. Robin Seager, Ammianus Marcellinus: Seven Studies in His Thought and Language

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 49, 34. 130. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 14.7.1, 28.1.3, 20.1.2, 28.4.10, 20.9.2, 28.1.12.

131.

Matthews, Roman Empire of Ammianus, 460.

Paideia and Power

61

light of educated opinion. Ammianus may have been a compatriot of Libanius’: he certainly shared in the same culture as did Libanius. A widely trayeled soldier, he knew better than did Libanius that, in the high politics of the empire, paideia went so far and no further. But like Libanius, he

ensured that it would be he and his readers who would live to tell the tale in their own, savagely precise terms. The “nostalgia” that has rightly been seen to pervade Ammianus’ account of his own times was based on a fierce refusal to relinquish the last prerogative of his class—the ability to record events that he wished had never happened. 132 Parrhésia: The Philosopher The elites, therefore, faced those who wielded power with many advan-

tages. They possessed a singularly tenacious common code. They could show an unforgiving memory against those who flouted their ideals of public behavior. They were capable of quiet obstinacy in withholding collaboration from unpopular officials. What they lacked was courage. Their “~ freedom of speech, the parrhésia that was the true legacy of the city-state, was strictly curtailed. They might still hope to persuade, but they couldy not challenge, those who exercised power. The reason for this was simple enough. To remain effective, the notables” depended on remaining within the patronage networks that linked the cities to the imperial administration and, hence, to the court. Parrhésia, for them,v

was the outcome of philia. It could only be exercised by those who felt that they could count on the friendship of the great. Libanius, for instance, \ was sufficiently sure of his friendship with the emperor Julian to stand up for the town council of Antioch in his presence in 362. Even that required some nerve. As he spoke, courtiers were overheard remarking, in loud voices, that the Orontes flowed beneath the windows of the palace: it might be a good idea to toss the tiresome professor into the river. 133 Libanius knew that he could go so far and no further. When he delivered the funeral oration on his uncle, Phasganius, the last third of his

speech had to be delivered behind closed doors, for it spoke of Phasganius’

parrhésia in standing up to the Caesar Gallus, Julian’s brother. Julian might be touchy on the subject. So Libanius withdrew to a room, “requesting 132. T. D. Barnes, “Literary Convention, Nostalgia and Reality in Ammianus Marcellinus,” in Reading the Past in Late Antiquity, ed. Graeme Clarke (Rushcutters Bay, New South Wales: Australian National University Press, 1990), 83. On the home country of Ammianus, see G. W. Bowersock, Journal ofRoman Studies 80 (1990): 247-48, suggesting Alexandria, not Antioch. 133. Libanius, Oratio 1.126 (1.143-48), in Norman, Libanius’ Autobiography, 74.

“

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Paden and Power

the hearers . . . not to draw the attention of a crowd by loud applause. And so far—may Nemesis remain kind—no frightening consequence has resulted.”’134 V The fact that Libanius’ most telling attacks on officials took place after they had fallen from power and their replacements. had indicated that a character assassination would be welcome remains a peculiarly disagreeable aspect of his career.135 The kindest thing that can be said about Libanius’ behavior is that his dilemma was widespread. As under the Ottoman Empire, the “politics of notables” was subject to very strict limits of the possible: their “modes of action must in normal circumstances be cautious and ambiguous . . . the use of influence in private; the cautious expression of discontent, by absenting themselves from the ruler’s presence; the discreet encouragement of opposition—but not up to the point when it may

call down the fatal blow of the ruler’s anger.’’136 U/

Parrhésia, therefore, was devolved to another, notoriously eccentric,

figure—the philosopher. He was a well-chosen spokesman. He almost always belonged to the notable class and shared in their paideia to a high degree. The philosopher-heroes of Eunapius of Sardis, for instance, moved in a world whose solid backdrop, rarely glimpsed behind accounts of their more memorable eccentricities, remained the life of well-to-do provincial notables. They represented a “typical blend of philosophy, rhetoric and divine learning.” 137 But the philosopher’s way of life was pointedly different. He was held to owe nothing to ties of patronage and friendship. He was a man who, by a heroic effort of the mind, had found freedom from so-

ciety. For that reason, he carried his right to parrhésia in his own person. He could address the great directly, in terms of a code of decorum and self-restraint that he himself exemplified to the highest degree, because he was uncompromised by political attachments. In the earlier centuries of the empire, the tranquil, bearded figure of the philosopher, with bare chest and simple cloak, carrying a leather satchel

and a staff, had been the focus of clearly defined and stable expectations: owing nothing to any man, the philosopher acted as the privileged counterpoint to those who exercised power.138 In late antiquity, this image of the philosopher had remained alive; it survived the “gradual drift to the pe134. 135.

Libanius, Ep. 283.2 (X.268); Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 26. Paul Petit, “Recherches sur la publication et la diffusion des discours de Libanius,”

Historia 5 (1956): 479-509.

136. A. Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century, ed. W. R. Polk and R. L. Cham-

bers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 46. 137. 138.

Penella, Greek Philosophers and Sophists, 75. Now excellently studied in Johannes Hahn, Der Philosoph und die Gesellschaft:

Paideia and Power

63

riphery of society” that characterized the leaders of the pagan philosophical schools in Athens and elsewhere. 139 It was, of course, mainly an image. Fourth-century views of the philosopher were frequently as far removed from the reality of the intense and profoundly apolitical study circles of a Plotinus or a Jamblichus as the modern image of Einstein is distant from the real work of a scientist. Yet it should not be dismissed for that reason. As has been shown in the case of the image of Einstein, such images “reinforce specific prejudices.”140 And the “specific prejudices” reinforced by the image of the philosopher concentrated, above all, on the control of power.

A man who had mastered’

his passions had gained the right to speak with authority to those who struggled to master theirs as a spiritual guide and, if need be, even as a critic.141 When Sopater the philosopher made his way from Apamea to the new city of Constantinople, his admirers were convinced that he had done so in order to “control and reform through reason the impulsiveness that was the basis of Constantine’s character.”!42 History would have been very different, Eunapius thought, if he had succeeded. Hence the fourth-century image of the philosopher was double-sided. The philosopher was a man free from society. He owed nothing to his peers and positively avoided those who exercised power. If he enjoyed wealth, culture, and social status (as many did), he did not allow these material

advantages to compromise his freedom. He was often by temperament a recluse and was frequently committed to traditions of philosophy, most notably to an extreme Platonism, that prized contemplation above all other human activities. But it was precisely in a self-created solitude that the philosopher developed the intelligence and strength of character which enabled him to inSelbstverstindis, offentliches Auftreten und populare Erwartungen in der hihen Kaiserzeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989), esp. 12-29.

139.

Garth Fowden, “The Pagan Holy Man in Late Antique Society,” Journal ofHellenic

Studies 102 (1982): 33, 51-59; see R. R. R. Smith, “Late Roman Philosopher Portraits

from Aphrodisias,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 144-46, 148-50, for striking new visual evidence. 140. A. J. Friedman and C. C. Douley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 193-94. 141.

I. Hadot, “The Spiritual Guide,” in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality, ed. A. H.,

Armstrong (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 436-59; Hahn, Der Philosoph und die Gesellschaft, 61-65. 142. Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers 462, in Wright, Philostratus and Eunapius, 380; I have preferred the translation in Penella, Greek Philosophers and Sophists, 51. Constantine,

of course, had other reasons for patronizing philosophers than his own self-improvement; see Garth Fowden, “Nicagoras of Athens and the Lateran Obelisk,” Journal ofHellenic Studies 107 (1987): 51-57.

64

Paideia and’Power

tervene in the world around him. The fact that many philosophers were quite content with solitude did not mean that others did not feel obliged, even tempted, to undertake the occasional venture into public life. It is a tribute to the pressure that could still,be brought upon them by their social peers and, above all, to the loyalty that they were expected to show to their hometown that a few philosophers, at least, agreed to play their allotted parts in the drama of persuasion in the course of the fourth century. On those occasions, the other, less-reclusive side of the image of the philosopher gave them a firm platform from which to act. Only the philosopher, a man who had overcome anger and fear in himself, could stand in the way of the anger of others. He could brave the menacing power of the great and ensure that his voice was heard in their councils. He was expected to bring amnesty for those caught in the toils of a political system in which, as we have seen, anger was ever-present. For this reason, we find philosophers continually admired for their ability to mingle with the celsae potestates, the emperor and his entourage, as few notables would have dared to have done. The philosopher brought to his task certain carefully nurtured virtues. The first was karteria, “endurance,” the ability to tough it out in confrontations with the powerful. In a society where cruelty was so pervasive, we should never underestimate the political weight of physical courage. A primal awe surrounded those who were known to have withstood torture. So many could not. During the treason trials instigated by the emperor Valens at Antioch in 376, a leading figure summoned Libanius. This man “regarded friendship as something sacred, but could not steel himself against torture. Thus he begged us to pray Fortune for his death. . . . He bathed, dined and welcomed sleep, and with it, came death; and next day, at dawn, we

were attending his funeral, when people arrived from the palace to arrest him.”143 What Libanius presented as a merciful heart attack may in fact have been suicide, which Libanius himself had advised.144

In the pages of Ammianus, philosophers, by contrast, show no such fear. They stand out in high relief against the terrible glow of the torture chamber. During the treason trials of 356, only one, Epigonus, revealed himself to

be “a philosopher in garb alone”: he broke under interrogation.145 The rest held firm. Such was Pasiphilus, “who, though cruelly tortured to bring about the ruin [of a colleague] through a false charge, could not be shaken from the firmness of a steadfast mind.”146 143.

144. 145. 146.

Libanius, Oratio 1.173-74 (1.164), in Norman, Libanius’ Autobiography, 99.

Eunapius, Fragment 39.2, ed. Blockley, p. 55. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 14.9.5.

Ibid., 29.1.36; cf. 14.9.5, 19.12.12, 29.1.37, 29.2.25.

Paideia and Power

65

An acute sense of the need for physical courage led Ammianus, though” loyal to the old gods, to speak with respect of the Christian cult of the martyrs. No better than executed criminals and objects of charnel horror to many others,!47 true Christian martyrs impressed Ammianus because, like philosophers, they had put their bodies “on the line” by facing suffering and death: “When forced to deviate from their observance, they endured the pains of torture, going so far as to meet a glorious death with ; inviolated faith.’’148 In situations where courage, obstinacy, and intelligence were needed, fourth-century communities still turned, at times, to their local philosophers. Ruined by the exactions of the praetorian prefect, Petronius Probus, the gentry of Epirus were “further compelled to send envoys to the emperor to offer him thanks.” They forced a philosopher called Iphicles, “a man renowned for his strength of soul,” to perform the duty. His courage and skill enabled him to confront the studiously ferocious Valentinian I and to turn what had been planned as a routine display of celebratory rhetoric into an occasion for plain-speaking.149 Furthermore, the philosopher, precisely because he was known to be fearless, brought to bear the decisive quality of parrhésia, candid speech and good counsel offered without fear or favor. In the world we have described, this was an infinitely precious social elixir. Galen had been convinced that no civic notable, no politeuomenos, could be trusted to tell the truth; no-

tables were incapable of receiving confidences and giving disinterested ad-° vice. 15° By contrast, the philosopher, as the purveyor of candor, was thought ” to have brought to public life a virtue that was of immediate political relevance. In a system of personal autocracy, the notion of “good counsel” summed up late Roman hopes for a remedy for public ills in a manner as resonant as does the word democracy today.151 147. Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists 472, in Wright, Philostratus and Eunapius, 424; Isidore of Pelusium, Epp. 1.55, 4.27: Patrologia Graeca 78:217BC, 1080c; Theodoret of Cyrthus, Graecarum Affectionum Curatio 8.11: Patrologia Graeca 83:1012C; P. Canivet, Théodoret de Cyr: Thérapeutique des Maladies Helléniques 2, Sources chrétiennes 57 (Paris: Le Cerf,

1958), 314; Severus of Antioch, Homeliae cathedrales 72: Patrologia Orientalis 12:84-87. 148.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 22.11.10; see E. D. Hunt, “Christians and

Christianity in Ammianus Marcellinus,” Classical Quarterly 35 (1985): 192-99. 149. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 30.5.9-10. 150. Galen, De cognoscendis animi morbis 1.3, ed. Kiihn, 5:8-9, trans. Harkins, pp. 32-33.

151.

Paul Veyne, Le Pain et le Cirque (Paris: Le Seuil, 1976), 711, trans. Bread and Cir-

cuses (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1990), 404; Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (London: Duckworth, 1977), 83-122; Karlheinz Dietz, Senatus contra prin-

cipem, Untersuchungen zur senatorischen Opposition gegen Kaiser Maximinus Thrax (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), 313-14. See Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 27.7.9, on Valentinian I;

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Paideia and Power

The philosopher, of course, was not alone in this. Despite the grim impression left by many contemporary accounts, good counsel was never lacking in the higher reaches of the government. Ammianus blamed only those celsae potestates, those heads of government departments and advisers of the emperor, who failed in their duty. It was they who should have controlled the emperor’s anger and modified his vindictiveness. His strictures assume ¥ that many still did so.152 Forthright speech in the consistorium, by professional experts on warfare and taxation, remained a possibility. The Gothic general Fravitta was no philosopher, yet he “spoke loudly and openly to the emperor . . . grimacing as he spoke.” Despite the annoyance of the eunuchs at such a breach of the ceremonious hush that usually reigned in the emperor’s presence, he was invited to continue.153 On hearing of

an edict that would force an unwelcome theological formula on the bishops of Cilicia in 432-433 the praetorian prefect, Taurus, “moved by a divine force [and, perhaps, by discreet gifts from the patriarch of Alexandria] would not allow it to be published. Entering into the imperial presence, he swore that the cities would be ruined, and stated, quite plainly, that

what Thrace [a province ruined by barbarian raids] is now, Cilicia would be, where hardly a city remains to pay its taxes.’’154 Yet these incidents from real life did not receive the same degree of attention from upper-class contemporaries as did the notion of intervention by the philosopher. For the philosopher’s activity condensed an acceptably stylized traditional image of the workings of power. He was not a mere / public servant, as men such as Fravitta and Taurus had been. In an age

of personal rule, he spoke directly to the all-important personal qualities of the ruler. For Ammianus, anger was the ulcer that festered beneath the surface of the autocracy.155 And anger had always been the specialty of the philosopher. It was a philosopher who had taught the emperor Augustus to recite all the letters of the Greek alphabet, in order to give himself time to take possession of himself, whenever he felt anger rise within him. 156 ; For this reason, the scenario of the philosopher who tamed the heart

of the emperor remained important in the political imagination of the later Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus 4.1, on Claudius; for the ideal, Scriptores Historiae Augustae: Severus Alexander 16.3; and the dangers of lack of counsel, Scriptores: Aurelian 43.3. 152. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 14.1.10, 28.1.25, 29.3.2.

153.

Eunapius, Fragment 48.8, ed. Blockley, pp. 111-13.

154.

Collectio Casinensis 211, ed. E. Schwartz, in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum

(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1932-33), 155. 155. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 27.7.4. 156. Epitome de Caesaribus 48.14-15.

1.4

Paideia and Power

67

empire. It explained why the worst did not always happen. To take one example: faced by the embarrassing fact that, for all his assumed fury against the church and for all the imagined heroism of the Christians of his age, the reign of Julian the Apostate produced so few martyrs, the author of the later Syriac Romance ofJulian the Apostate (who probably wrote in the late fifth century) fell back on the image of the court philosopher.157 In the Romance the rage of Julian, the pagan tyrant, is invariably brought to a standstill by a succession of discreet advisers. The first such figure is the philosopher Aplatus, a man expert in knowledge, and renowned among the philosophers; and although he was much of a pagan, he gave good counsel and just. . . . “The power of your kingdom [he said] is to destroy or have mercy. . . . There is no person above you to reprove your will. . . . Since I have received liberty from your

power and have the assurance not to gloss over what is a duty, I reply that you have the power as king, . . . [but] God have mercy on your kingdom when it overrides the laws of justice, seeing that all the regulations of duty come from you alone.”158

Shop-soiled though it might be through constant use, the image of the philosopher continued to condense an ideal of integrity and plain-speaking not usually current in governing circles. For bureaucrats, to adopt the persona of a philosopher was to cast a cloak of old-world integrity over risky business. Hermogenes had acted as personal secretary to the fierce Caesar Gallus.159 He was praised for having retired from that difficult post with a clean record. According to his panegyrist, the rhetor Himerius, Hermogenes “spoke out in conversations [with Gallus] to such effect that he made the ruler’s rule milder, by narrating ancient myths and stories from poetry and history.’16° In reality, of course, not all interventions involved the imperial wrath. The normal business of the court concerned the workings of a vast patronage system. As in the Duke of Milan’s court in Shakespeare’s Tempest, the art of government depended on grace and favor: 157.

M. van Esbroeck, “Le soi-disant Roman de Julien l’Apostat,” in IV Symposium

Syriacum 1984, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 229 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium,

158. 39-49.

1987), 191-202.

H. Gollancz, trans., Julian the Apostate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929),

159.

T. D. Barnes, “Himerius and the Fourth Century,” Classical Philology 82 (1987):

219; 160.

Himerius, Oratio 48.19, ed. A. Colonna (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico, 1951), 205.

.

68 Paideia and Power how to grant suits, How to deny them, who t’advance and who To trash for over-topping.16

»

%

/ To be considered capable of telling the truth about the personal worth of individuals and the rights and wrongs of a case made the philosopher, the man of parrhésia, the perfect patronage secretary. His reputation further refurbished by a spell of philosophical retirement, Hermogenes went on to serve in the petitions office under Julian: ““What laws by him were not generous? What man in peril did not escape danger through him? What men deserving of office failed to obtain it through him?”1% In the fourth century the ancient image of the philosopher as a privileged adviser of emperors could still guide the actions of real persons on the fringes of government. This was the case for one memorably successful philosopher, Themistius of Constantinople. Under emperors as different from each other as Constantius II, Valens, and Theodosius I, Themistius

condensed for contemporaries expectations of a style of rule that still found room for the figure of the philosopher at court.1% Accident and the tenacious bonds of family tradition and regional loyalty ensured that Themistius happened to be a philosopher at Constantinople at a time when the city was on its way to becoming the pivot of the eastern empire. He exploited this situation with remarkable effectiveness. He lived out an ancient role. When he dined and traveled with the emperor Constantius II, he was always careful to be seen wearing the sober tribonion of the philosopher; he made plain his indifference to wealth by foregoing the usual grain allowance of a proconsul of Constantinople. A man with a solid reputation for parrhésia, Themistius could make direct suggestions to even the morose and ill-educated emperor Valens, “who was always on the alert to detect personal advantage behind every seemingly 161.

The Tempest 1.2.79-81. Quoted from Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., Wil-

liam Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1318. 162. Himerius, Oratio 48.30, ed. Colonna, p. 209.

163.

G. Dagron, “L’Empire romain d’Orient au ive. siécle et les traditions politiques

de l’Hellénisme: Le témoignage de Thémistius,” Travaux et Mémoires 3 (1968): 1-242; Jones, Martindale, and Morris, Prosopography 1:889-94; L. J. Daly, “In a Borderland: Themistius’

Ambivalence toward Julian,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 73 (1980): 1-11; idem, “Themistius’ Refusal of a Magistracy,” Jahrbuch der dsterreichischen Byzantinistik 32 (1982): 177-86; Scott

Bradbury, “The Date of Julian’s Letter to Themistius,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

28 (1987): 235-51. See B. Colpi, Die paideia des Themistius (Bern: Peter Lang, 1987), on

Themistius’ sources. 164. Themistius, Oratio 34.14, 23.291c-292b, in Themistii Orationes ed. G. Downey and A. F. Norman (Leipzig: Teubner, 1971), 2:222, 85-86.

Paideia and Power

69

public-spirited request.”165 The correspondence of Libanius shows Themistius at the head of a tentacular network of patronage. As nominal head of the Senate of Constantinople, he had a hand in expanding its membership from three hundred to two thousand and so was in a position to ex‘tend his favors to a wide constituency of provincial notables anxious to secure the privileges of senatorial rank and posts at court.16 The related themes of amnesty and anger play a large role in Themistius’ public utterances. He acted as the spokesman of the imperial benevolence. He even cited “an Assyrian maxim” (in fact, the Old Testament) to the effect that “the heart of the king is in the hand of God.’’!67 As the source of all amnesty, the emperor was the “living law,” the embodiment of God’s mercy on earth.16 For over thirty years the presence of Themistius near the emperors gave flesh and blood to the maxims of the imaginary Aplatus. At Antioch he even pacified the emperor Valens, by giving a speech in favor of religious toleration. He was believed by Christians to have succeeded in persuading the emperor to commute into exile the death penalty that had threatened obdurate supporters of the creed of Nicaea.16 It was because of 2 man such as Themistius that the figures of philosophers in medieval Byzantine legends retained, for all the fantastic accretions of a later age, the firm out-

line of their role in late antiquity. Philosophers were supposed to be men Y of the court, “at one and the same time close to power and independent Of it. 170 Thus, the image of the philosopher still stood at the top of an imaginative pyramid that linked a discreet but persistent network of upper-class persuasion to the imperial court. Cautious and fundamentally unheroic 165.

Themistius, Oratio 34.14, ed. Downey and Norman, 2.222; see Daly, “Themistius’

Refusal of a Magistracy,” 163. 166.

Themistius, Oratio 34.13, ed. Downey and Norman, 2:221; G. Dagron, La naissance

d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 a 451 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,

167.

1974), 129-32.

Themistius, Oratio 7.89d, 11.147c, 19.229a, ed. Downey and Norman,

1:135,

2:22, 333, citing Proverbs 21:1; Lellia Cracco Ruggini, Simboli di battaglia ideologica nel tardo ellenismo (Pisa: Pacini, 1972): 17, n. 35. 168. Themistius, Oratio 5.64bc, ed. Downey and Norman,

1:93-94. On the after-

math of the death of Julian and combined with a plea for religious tolerance, see 5.67b, ed. Downey and Norman, 1:98-99; cf. 11.154a and 16.212d, ed. Downey and Norman, 1:230, 303-4; Dagron,

“L’Empire romain de l’Orient,”

127-34.

169.

Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 6.36; R. Snee, “Valens’ Recall of the Nicene Exiles

170.

G. Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984),

and Anti-Arian Propaganda,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 26 (1985): 413-17. 232

70

Paideia and Power

though those who operated within this network might be, they enjoyed an almost total monopoly of access to the imperial government for most of the fourth century. The conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 312 had little effect on a style of rule still based on collaboration with the local elites. When in 388 the emperor Theodosius I left Constantinople to conquer Italy from the Gallic usurper Maximus, he acted in the traditional manner. The venerable Themistius, now approaching seventy, was among those left in charge of the education of Theodosius’ son, the young prince Arcadius. Yet soon after, another tutor of the prince, Arsenius, would

flee the palace and disappear for a generation into the deserts of Egypt: among the illiterate monks he claimed to have found a fascinating new alphabet of the heart that owed nothing to his knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics.171 And when it came to the all-absorbing topic of the emperor’s wrath, Theodosius would soon have to deal with a former provincial governor now entering his fifties; Ambrose, Catholic bishop of Milan: the encounter was to prove more drastic than any he had experi« ¥ enced in his dealings with the urbane Themistius. A new type of ‘‘philosopher” had emerged. It is to this development that we must turn in our next chapter.

SS

171.

Apophthegmata Patrum: Arsenius 5: Patrologia Graeca 65:89A.

CHAPTER

THREE

Poverty and Power

Universalis via

In the early fourth century two philosophers came to visit Saint Anthony. He recognized them instantly “from their appearance” as they trudged up the mountain path to his hermitage.! On another occasion a visiting philosopher was surprised to learn that Anthony had brought no books with him into the desert. Turning to the awesome stillness outside his cell, Anthony said: “My book, o philosopher, is the nature of God’s creation; it is present whenever I wish to read His words.”? The incident is related in a series of anecdotes about the monks of Egypt put into circulation in fifth-century Constantinople by upper-class Christians. The monks, in reality, came from a wide variety of social backgrounds and were far from averse to reading and producing books.3 But Christian’ writers consistently presented them as men untouched by paideia. The monk was the antithesis of the philosopher, the representative of the educated upper classes. Anthony had been a farmer’s son, ignorant of Greek and 1. Athanasius, Life of Anthony 72. 2. Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 4.23, in Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. A. C. Zenos, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1979), 2:107. 3. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early

Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 252; Clemens Scholten, “Die Nag-Hammadi-Iexte als Buchbesitz der Pachomianer,” Jahrbuch fiir Antike und Christentum

31 (1988): 144-72.

A

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taught by God alone.* This was the message which a document such as

the Life ofAnthony, soon associated with none other’ than Athanasius, pa-

triarch of Alexandria, and rapidly translated into Latin, was intended to

convey to the elites of the empire.5 The.eaction of Augustine, at that time a teacher of rhetoric in Milan—the Latin equivalent of his older contem/ porary, Libanius of Antioch—was not unique. On being told the story of Saint Anthony by a visiting official in 386, he drew a single, drastic ~ J conclusion. It was his culture that stood condemned; “the uneducated rise

up and take heaven by storm, and we, with all our learning, here we are, still wallowing in flesh and blood.’’6 The hatred of the monks expressed by non-Christians all over the empire is a further measure of their instantaneous impact on the imagination of contemporaries. Writing at the very end of the fourth century, the pagan Eunapius of Sardis found it not surprising that the barbarous Visigoths should claim to have Christian monks. This was only to be expected, given the lamentable state of the empire: for “it was sufhcient to trail along grey cloaks and tunics, to be a ne’er do well and to have the reputation of being

one. The barbarians used these devices to deceive the Romans, since they shrewdly observed that these things were respected amongst them.”7” Y The rise to prominence of Christian monks was a warning signal. It announced wider changes in late Roman culture and society. The notables had based their authority on a monopoly of highly formalized codes of speech. Their ability to persuade the powerful depended on a grudging recognition that, in large areas of the day-to-day administration of the provinces, their collaboration was essential, just as their culture—based as it

was on centuries of unbroken tradition—seemed irreplaceable. The two aspects went together. The traditional culture, with its distinctive forms of speech and behavior, was appropriate to persons who were called upon, as town councillors, to control their cities and to collect taxes according to traditional, well-tried methods. The notables’ monopoly of formalized speech was mirrored in their monopoly of an equally formalized “theatrical style” of local politics.8 Hence the sharpness of the challenge was summed up in the persons 4.

Athanasius, Life ofAnthony 1, 73, 93.

5. See T. D. Barnes, “Angel of Light or Mystic Initiate? The Problem of the Life of Anthony,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 37 (1986): 353-68. Many arguments still support the traditional ascription of the Life of Anthony to Athanasius. 6.

Augustine, Confessions 8.8.19.

7. Eunapius, Fragment 48.2, in The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire, ed. and trans. R. C. Blockley, ARCA 10 (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1983), 77. 8.

E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7

(1974): 389.

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73

of the monks. They were presented as the spearhead of a drive to subvert “~ a cultural and political monopoly: “Because the old power-holders work” within a code of formalization, they cannot be challenged gradually but only altogether, by an almost deliberate, sacrilegious disregard for a traditional culture.”? The monks could utter the gros mots that broke the spell of paideia. As tutor to the sons of Theodosius I, Arsenius would have known the aging philosopher Themistius, his colleague at the court. He fled from the palace of Constantinople to Egypt, to save his soul. Over a decade later he emerged from the hermitages of the Wadi Natrun to settle for a time at Canopus, near Alexandria, on the site of a temple complex that had been frequented, only a generation previously, by a philosopher-hero of Eunapius of Sardis.19 Arsenius was a changed man. He had once represented the prestige of paideia at the imperial court. Now he hung on the words of his spiritual guide, an elderly Egyptian: “I knew Greek and Latin learning. But I have not yet learned the ABC with this peasant.”1! Anecdotes from the desert carried weight because they confirmed atti- / tudes that had been prepared in the cities. Following a long tradition that v reached back to the apologists of the second and third centuries, Christian

writers insisted that the miraculous character of their religion was proved by the manner in which it had been spread throughout the Roman world by humble men, without paideia.12 The “God-taught” wisdom of the monks of Egypt was so important to Christian contemporaries because it was held to be an avatar of the first, Spirit-filled preaching of “fishermen, publicans and the tentmaker”—the apostles and Saint Paul—for “God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.’ It was a commonplace of Christian polemic that the church had brought to the Roman world a wisdom and a moral code that had previously been the fragile acquisition of, at best, a few great minds. In the words of Augustine, in his City of God, any old woman, as a baptized Christian, now

knew more about the true nature of the invisible world of angels and de9. M. Bloch, “Why Oratory?” in Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. M. Bloch (London: Academic Press, 1975), 25. 10. Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers 470, in Philostratus and Eunapius, ed. and trans.

W. C. Wright, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 416.

11. Apophthegmata Patrum: Arsenius 6: Patrologia Graeca 65:89A; B. Ward, trans., Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Cistercian Studies 59 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications,

1975), 8.

12. Origen, Contra Celsum 7.60; cf. 6.2. 13. 1 Corinthians 1:27. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Graecarum affectionum curatio 5.6: Patrologia Graeca 83:945B; P. Canivet, ed., Théodoret de Cyr: Thérapeutique des maladies hellén-

iques, Sources chrétiennes 57 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1957), 246.

74

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mons than did Porphyry, the most learned of near-contemporary philosophers.!* Christ had brought to the world an universalis via, a “universal way” of salvation which only proud worshipers of the gods continued to ignore.!5 The Catholic church had gathered all nations and all classes into its bosom, populari sinu.16 The Bible itself, with its seemingly endless layers of meaning, was a microcosm of the social and intellectual diversity to be found in the Christian churches. “Its plain language and simple style make it accessible to all. . . . this book stands out alone on so high a peak of authority and yet can draw the crowds to the embrace of its inspired simplicity.”17 The Roman empire, in Augustine’s opinion, had never been so fortunate as when Christian teaching spread throughout its populations: “From the raised benches of the clergy, the precept Render to no man evil for evil is read out as given by divine authority, and wholesome counsel is proclaimed in the midst of our congregations, as if it were in schoolrooms open, now, to both sexes, to all ages and to all ranks of society.”18 “We are dealing with what might be called a Christian populism, that

«me flouted the culture of the governing classes and claimed to have brought, x67,

instead,/ simple words, \endowed with divine authority, to the masses of

+ /

the empire. To have presented Christianity in this manner was a masterstroke of writers who were, themselves, highly educated men. Christian writers of the

fourth and fifth centuries wielded with dazzling effect the rhetoric of paradox.!9 It was a rhetoric that owed its effect to the close juxtaposition of the high with the low, of traditional marks of status, wealth, and cul-

ture with their charged absence. Such language discreetly emphasized the high social position of those who used it: we look with them over the edge of a precipice, on which they themselves stood, viewing the world from a great height. Master practitioners of Greek and Latin style, men such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine and their innumerable colleagues in the Greek world backed into the limelight that they had brought to bear on the illiterate monks, apostles, and martyrs. Their very insistence 14.

Augustine, City of God 10.11.37; John Chrysostom, Baptismal Catechism 8.6, in

Jean Chrysostome: Huit catéchéses baptismales, ed. A. Wenger, Sources chrétiennes 50bis (Paris:

Le Cerf, 1970), 250. 15.

Augustine, City of God 10.32.

16.

Augustine, Confessions 6.5.8; see J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops:

Army, Church and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 173-74, for similar sentiments in John Chrysostom. 17. Augustine, Confessions 6.5.8. 18.

Augustine, Letter 138.2.10.

19. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 178-88.

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75

on the extent to which their own conversion and subsequent duties in the Christian church had led them to sacrifice the advantages attached to wealth and refined diction drew attention to just those qualities. Like the great Indian leaders of political mass movements in our own century, they could not escape (and often they did not wish to escape) the tenacious web of markers of high status that supported their authority in Roman society. Men of great possessions, in culture if not always in material wealth, they lived as best they could with the ambiguities of a “babu-coolie relationship”: “An appeal to the idea of sacrifice was really an appeal to the power v that flowed from inequality. In order to be able to make sacrifices, one needed to possess. . . . To talk of sacrifice was then to talk of possessions, and hence of power.”20 It was an open secret that many Christian bishops owed their prestige in society at large to the fact that they had once been rhetors. A recently discovered letter of Augustine’s shows him as an old man who had just completed the City of God. He was approached by Firmus, a notable of Carthage. Firmus was not yet a baptized Christian. He had made little headway in reading the City of God. But he thought nothing of asking the bishop of Hippo, an old, sick man, for his expert opinion, as a former

rhetor, on the style of model declamations composed at school by his son!#1 Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, Augustine’s younger contemporary in the Greek East, a zealous biographer of monks and the proponent of views similar to those of Augustine on the spread of Christianity in his Remedy for the Malady ofHellenic Beliefs, maintained warm relations with a leading sophist and known non-Christian, Isocasius.??

Yet the pronounced populist streak in late Roman Christian literature v should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. We are dealing with a tenacious ” “representation” of the entire social and cultural evolution of the later empire.23 It was in these terms that articulate Christians chose to make sense,

to themselves quite as much as to others, of the success of the church. 20.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Prince-

ton: Princeton

21.

University Press, 1989), 144, 152.

Augustine, Ep 2*.12-13, ed. J. Divjak, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latino-

rum 88 (Vienna: W. Tempsky, 1981), 19-21; Bibliotheque augustinienne: Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 46B: Lettres 1*-29* (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1987), 88-93; R. B. Eno, trans.,

Saint Augustine: Letters VI (1*-29*), Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America

Press, 1989), 28-29.

22. R.A. Kaster, Guardians ofLanguage: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 89. 23. This helpful term of art has been exploited in Francoise Thélamon, Paiens et chrétiens au iveme siecle: Liapport de ’ “Histoire ecclésiastique” de Rufin dAquilée (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes,

1981), 86, 96.

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Y Carefully selected fragments of late Roman experience—the undoubted social diversity of the Christian congregations,‘ the simplicity of the Christian Scriptures, the lack of culture of many Christian heroes, and, as we

/ shall see, the extent of the Christian care of the poor—were fastened on by contemporaries. They were given exceptional prominence, in Christian v/ preaching and in Christian narratives of their own times. For these vivid traits lent a sense of concreteness to the grandiose outlines of the Christian image of a church empowered, by God’s providence, to absorb all levels of Roman society. Fourth-century Christianity, in fact, was far from being a “popular” movement. It is not certain that it had become the majority religion of any one region before the conversion of Constantine in 312, still less that it V appealed to any broad stratum of the population.?5 By the end of the fourth century, the church, far from being a church of the lower classes, reflected

/ the sharp divisions in Roman society: its upper echelons were occupied by highly cultivated persons, drawn from the class of urban notables. Their preaching tended to address the wealthier and more educated members of the congregation.”¢ In a partially Christianized region such as northern Italy, the effectiveness of Christian teaching depended on an alliance between the clergy and those families of notables who had become Christians.27 Yet it is just at this time that the more aggressively populist components of the Christian representation of the triumph of the church reached their peak. This is hardly surprising. We are dealing with the dramatic self-image of a group poised to take over the high ground of Roman society. It was essential to invoke such themes in order to challenge, in as dramatic a manner as possible, the monopoly of culture associated with traditional non-Christian leaders. For many town councillors, loyalty to the city still demanded loyalty to its gods. There were many who feared the worst for their city under a Christian dispensation: “All, the temples that are in it will fall, the religion of the town will cease, our enemies will rise

against us, our town will perish and all this great honor which you see will pass away.”?8 But despite Christian claims to have triumphed over the gods of the city and despite the tenacious, if muffled, resentment of well24.

R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: A. Knopf, 1987), 293-312.

25.

Fox, Pagans and Christians, 265-93; but see T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius

(Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 191. 26. Ramsay MacMullen, “The Preacher and His Audience,” Journal of Theological Studies,

n.s., 40 (1989): 503-11.

27. Rita Lizzi, Vescovi e strutture ecclesiastiche nella citta tardoantica (Como: New Press, 1989), 15-57; idem, “Ambrose’s Contemporaries and the Christianization of Northern

Italy,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 157-61, 164-68. 28.

A. Mingana, ed. and trans., The Vision of Theophilus, Woodbrooke Studies 3 (Cam-

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77

placed non-Christians throughout this period, the issue was not a straightforward conflict of religions. It was only presented as such by Christian sources. We are dealing, rather, with a struggle for a new style of urban“/ leadetship. Already severely fissured by the processes that we have described, the civic elites of the fourth century were faced by a relatively new, but determined, faction, very largely drawn from their own ranks. The Christian/ bishop and his clergy claimed an ever-increasing share in the exercise of authority in the city. In doing so, they offered new ways to mobilize and also to control the city’s inhabitants. These, in turn, gave new weight to strategies of persuasion that had already been deployed by the men of paideia in their dealings with governors and with the imperial court. Under the cover of a Christian language shot through with paradox, which seemed to threaten brutal discontinuity between the old and the new, a regrouping took place among the dominant factions in the late Roman cities. The tacit acceptance by the civic notables of a new partner, in the never-ending task of exercising control within the city and of representing its needs to the outside world was hastened by clear signals from a Christian court. The Christian bishop became a vir venerabilis, a person deemed “‘worthy of reverence” by the powerful.2? With the bishop, the voice of a newly Y formed urban grouping, the local Christian congregation, came to be heard in the politics of the empire. The sharpness and dramatic tones of the Christian self-image sprang from ¥ the very closeness of the conflicting parties. Its assertive clarity was de-¥ signed to counter considerable blurring in day-to-day practice. Notables who agreed to collaborate, as Christians, with bishops such as Ambrose

of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus found that their culture and the wealth and political influence that went with it were by no means dismissed out of hand.%° Nowhere was the Christian representation of the church’s novel role in society more aggressively maintained than in the claim of Christian bishbridge: W. Heffer, 1931), trans. p. 25, Syriac p. 65. See esp. Claude Lepelley, Les cités de l'Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1979), 1:351-69; M. Salzman, “Aristocratic Women: Conductors of Christianity in the Fourth Century,” Helios 16 (1989): 207-20. Salzman effectively criticizes the trend to exaggerate the success of Christian women in spreading Christianity among the Roman aristocracy. Pierre Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 55-56;

E. Wipozycka, La christianisation de l’Egypte au ive.—ve. siécles. Aspects sociaux et ethniques.” Aegyptus 68 (1988), 117-64; Z. Borkowski, “Local Cults and Resistance to Chris-

tianity,” Journal ofJuristic Papyrology 20 (1990): 25-30. 29.

Ernst Jerg, Vir venerabilis: Untersuchungen zur Titulatur der Bischéfe in den ausser-

kirchlichen Texten der Spatantike, Wiener Beitrage zur Theologie 26 (Vienna: Herder, 1970), 94-128. 30. Kaster, Guardians of Language, 76-81.

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ops to act as “lovers of the poor.” The theme of “love of the poor” exercised a gravitational pull quite disproportionate to the actual workings of Christian charity in the fourth century. It drew into its orbit the two closely related issues of who, in fact, were the most effective protectors and pacifiers of the lower classes of the cities and of how wealth was best spent by the rich within the city. Both themes went far beyond the narrow limits of the church’s traditional, somewhat inward-looking concern for the poor. This had amounted to little more than care for destitute believers, the sup-

port of newly arrived coreligionists from other cities, and the protection of the widows and orphans of Christian families.31 In fourth-century conditions, however, “love of the poor” took on a new resonance. It was an

activity that came to affect the city as a whole. In the apposite words of Arnaldo Momigliano, the Christian bishops and the educated admirers of the monks brought about the equivalent of the patrician’s transitio ad plebem /V in the early days of Rome. In the name of a religion that claimed to challenge the values of the elite, upper-class Christians gained control of the lower classes of the cities.32 By the end of the fourth century their auv thority rested on a newly created constituency. Acting, frequently, in alliance with monks, bishops could display a form of parrhésia that was better calculated to sway the will of the emperor and of his servants than was the discreet lobbying of the men of paideia. For they claimed to speak for the populations of troubled cities at a time of mounting crisis. Nourisher of the City It is important to realize the potential perils of the situation in which this development occurred. The notables were held hostage by their cities. In the eyes of the emperor, the value of the town councils was not limited

vA

to their collaboration with the imperial representatives for the annual collection of taxes. Tax collecting took them into the very different world of the countryside. The urban plebs was not subject to the land tax. It has been estimated that the cities contributed only one-twentieth of the tax budget of the empire. From the fiscal point of view, the later empire was an agrarian society. But the inhabitants of the cities— most especially 31. Fox, Pagans and Christians, 322-25; A. Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1924), 127-61; H. L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kom-

mentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1975), 4:536610. These remain the most comprehensive collections of evidence for early Christianity and Judaism. 32. A.D. Momigliano, “After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” Annali della Scuola Normale

Superiore di Pisa, ser. 3, 8 (1978): 435-54, now in Sesto Contributo alla storia degli Studi Classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni Storia e Letteratura, 1980), 282-83.

33.

A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 1:464-65.

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79 t

those of the major centers of the eastern Mediterranean, whose populations ran to hundreds of thousands—had to be kept quiet. As an outstanding recent study of urban autonomy in North Africa and Italy in the second and third centuries has made plain, the self-government of the cities had relieved the imperial administration of the need to police the lower orders. The civic notables were responsible for the good behavior of the / populace. It was for the notables to instill feelings of deference and a re-V’ spect for law that would ensure a quietissimus populus, an innocens ordo.34 This had remained the case in the fourth century. The maintenance of v deference was a constant preoccupation of the urban upper classes.35 It was important, for Libanius, that he should be greeted by the shopkeepers as he passed through Antioch: “‘Decent and polite, isn’t he? He replies in kind to the greetings even of the penniless.’ . . . they like the sight and sound of me.”3¢ His students were prepared for civic life by learning to show a well-bred civility to their inferiors: “May an artisan never be roughly handled by a boy dedicated to paideia. He must learn to live at peace with such people and never be considered unworthy of the praises of those who earn their bread with the work of their hands.”37 Above all, the resident notable was expected to act as a spokesman and patron for members of the lower classes. Libanius was proud of his record in this respect. He protected artisans and, especially, the members of the

bakers’ guild. At a time of rising prices in 382-383, the governor decided to placate the populace by ordering the public flogging of a group of bakers: He sat there in his carriage and inquired at every stroke how much had gone in bribes and to whom, for them to charge prices like this for bread... . I approached in all ignorance, following my usual path. I heard the sound of the lash, so dear to the common folk who were all agog at the sight of the bleeding backs. . . . Straightway I parted the crowd with my hands, and advanced to the wheel, silent and reproachful. There I spoke out loud and long . . . that if he did not abate his wrath, he would see a morrow such as he would not wish to see.38 34.

Frangois Jacques, Le Privilege de la Liberté, Collection de l’école frangaise de Rome

76 (Rome:

Palais Farnése,

1984), 801, 379-404.

35. Peter Brown, “Dalla ‘plebs romana’ alla ‘plebs Dei’: Aspetti della cristianizzazione di Roma,” in Passatopresente 2 (Turin: Giapichelli, 1982), 126-27. 36. Libanius, Oratio 2.6 (1.240-241), in Libanius: Selected Works 2, ed. and trans. A. F. Norman, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 12; cf. Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers 481, in Wright, Philostratus and Eunapius, 462. 37. Libanius, Oratio 58.4 (IV.468), trans. A. J. Festugiére, Antioche paienne et chré-

tienne, Bibliotheque des écoles frangaises d’Athénes et de Rome 194 (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1959), 468.

38. man,

Libanius, Oratio 1.208 (1.176), in Libanius’ Autobiography, ed. and trans. A. F. Nor(London:

Oxford

University Press, 1965), 113, 207-8.

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One of the most vehemently expressed concerns of Libanius in his old age was that, if young notables were unwilling or incompetent to speak out before governors, they would lose the respect of their lower-class clients. A manual laborer would not look up to a notable who was unable to defend himself, let alone others.39 Disrespect for town councillors on the part of a governor was a serious matter. It meant the erosion of the subtle ties of deference and patronage that guaranteed the safety of the city.4° The situation in the fourth century was truly dangerous. The deference exacted by the upper classes was based, in part, on their involvement in the economic life of the city. From the greatest cities of the empire to the smallest, a proportion of the foodstuffs consumed by the urban populace came from the estates of the notables. Much of the income of the urban upper classes was realized from the sale of food, especially of grain and wine, to an urban market.41 Those who expected deference, in the well-bred manner that Libanius advocated, were precisely those who could

be accused of oppressing the populace through engineering food shortages and taking advantage of the consequent steep rise in prices, or through failing to sell at sufficiently low prices the foodstuffs provided by the emperor for the city. Both the Caesar Gallus in 354 and the emperor Julian in 362-363 held the town council of Antioch responsible for the high price of food during their residences in the city.42 In Rome, the beautiful townhouse in Trastevere owned by L. Aurelius Avianius Symmachus (the father of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, the orator and upholder of the old religion) was set on fire by a mob in 375, “spurred on by the fact that a common fellow among the plebeians had alleged . . . that [Symmachus] had said that he would rather use his wine for quenching lime-kilns than sell it at the price which the people had hoped for.”43 If the web of patronage and deference that was supposed to guarantee the good behavior of the 39.

Libanius,

40.

Libanius, Oratio 33.11 (III.171), in Norman, Libanius 2, 204.

Oratio 35.7 (III.213), in Festugiére, Antioche, 485.

41.

Lellia Cracco Ruggini, Economia e societa nell’Italia Annonaria (Milan: A. Giuffre,

1961), 112-52; Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Shortage in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 257-68; M. Wérrle, Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien, Vestigia 39 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 66-68. See J. Durliat, De la

ville antique a la ville byzantine, Collection de l’école frangaise de Rome 136 (Rome: Palais Farnese 1990), 514-39 and 564-602. This important study presents the imperial administration as the exclusive provider of basic foodstuffs for all major cities. If valid, this view would modify the model, of extensive private commerce, assumed by all other authors. 42. J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later

Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 129-31; John Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus (London: Duckworth, 1989), 406-14. Durliat, De la ville antique a la ville byzantine, 360-65, sees the town council as no more than administrators of imperial

food supplies. This is too trenchant a conclusion in this case. 43. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 27.3.4; Symmachus, Epp. 1.44, 2.38.

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lower classes could be unravelled so swiftly by such incidents, then it is not surprising that men such as Libanius felt that they had to work so hard to maintain it. Tlie town councils faced the people of their cities with virtually no coercive force. The armies were usually stationed at a considerable distance from the major urban centers of the Mediterranean. Only in quite exceptional circumstances were units of regular troops sent in to impose order.*4 In

the normal course of affairs, the governor had only a small retinue; this group, however, might include archers to deal with an emergency.*5 The normal maintenance of law and order in a late Roman city devolved on the heads of artisan guilds and on the headmen of neighborhoods. They, at least, could be held responsible for any disorder, after the event.‘¢

In Rome, a gigantic conglomeration of almost half a million inhabitants in the fourth century, the three urban cohorts and the seven units of urban

vigiles set up by Augustus had been allowed to melt away. The prefects of Rome found themselves with no armed force whatsoever at their disposal.47 When the mob attempted to torch his house in 365, the prefect Lampadius beat a hasty retreat to the far side of the Milvian Bridge, “as though to wait there for the cessation of the tumult,” leaving his neighbors, with their household servants, to drive off the attackers by pelting them with stones and tiles from the housetops.#8 The very next year his“ successor, Viventius, was faced by riots caused by a disputed election to the bishopric of Rome. On one day, 137 corpses of the slain were found after a clash in the large basilica of Sicinnius, the future Santa Maria Maggiore.49 Viventius “was able neither to end nor to diminish this strife, . . .

was compelled to yield to its great violence, and retired to the suburbs.”5° Alexandria, a notoriously riot-prone city, was equally devoid of regular police: governors entered the city “in fear and trembling.”5! Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria were exceptionally large and disintegrated cities by ancient standards. But they were the most brilliant representatives of urban life in the Roman world. What happened in their streets set the tone for smaller cities and was watched anxiously by the imperial court. Throughout the Mediterranean, therefore, town councillors were

responsible for the good behavior of urban populations, whom they had 44.

Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 126.

45.

Libanius,

46.

Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 122-24; Codex Theodosianus 16.4.5 (A.D. 404).

47.

Jones, Later Roman

48. 49. SOM

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 27.3.8-9. Ibid., 27.3.13. bide 732.

51.

Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium 37, ed. J. Rougé, Sources chrétiennes 124 (Paris:

Oratio 19.35-36

Le Cerf, 1966), 174.

(II.401-2), in Norman,

Libanius 2, 290.

Empire 2:693.

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no means to control other than traditional, frail skills of urban leadership,

inherited from earlier centuries. ; Hence a “representation” of the notable’s relation to his city continued to have relevance throughout the fourth century. It goes without saying that this representation was as stylized, and as deliberately blind to many aspects of late Roman reality, as was the very different representation propounded by many Christians. But it still made sense of much of late Roman civic life. It summed up centuries of experience of urban politics. Instilled as part of the educational process associated with paideia and consequently expressed in highly traditional terms, an image of their role in the city formed part of the collective mentality of the urban upper classes all over the Greek world (as it did, also, in a slightly different manner, but with the same te-

nacity, among the resident members of the Senate of Rome). Phrases from late antique inscriptions from many cities and the frequent occurrence of images taken from the language of urban generosity in the sermons of contemporary Christian preachers show that, far from being the product of an archaizing rhetoric, a traditional representation of the ancient city remained an enduring and weighty presence in the minds of contemporaries.52 ' What was at stake was the use of wealth in the city. As predominant landowners, often controlling extensive networks of transport and the means of trade, the urban upper classes controlled much of the wealth of their locality.53 This economic predominance was supposed to be transmuted, through a traditional image of the urban community, into a gracious and paternal relationship. The town councillors were “fathers” of the démos, the plebs.54 The good notable was a “nourisher,” a tropheus, to his city.55 He re-

paid the “nurture” which his city had bestowed upon him in his youth by means of a continuous stream of gifts.5¢ These gifts were directed to the city as a whole —in the form of buildings —or to a clearly defined group of beneficiaries, to the démos, that is, to the citizen body of the city as distinct from the town council—in the form of distributions of money and food. 52.

See the classic exploration of Christian preaching to illustrate an epigraphic theme

in L. Robert, Hellenica 13 (1965): 226-27. 53. C.R. Whittaker, “Later Roman Trade and Traders,” in Trade in the Ancient Econ-

omy, ed. P. Garnsey, K. Hopkins, and C. R. Whittaker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 169-80.

54.

Libanius, Oratio 11.51 (1.486-87), in “Libanius’ Oration in Praise of Antioch,”

trans. G. Downey, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 669; Paul

Veyne, Le Pain et le Cirque (Paris: Le Seuil, 1976), 271-327, trans. Bread and Circuses (Lon-

don: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1990), 131-56; Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale a Byzance (Paris: Mouton, 1977), 181-88. See M. Sartre, L’Orient romain. Provinces et sociétes provinciales (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), 163-66.

55.

Robert, Hellenica 13 (1965): 226-27.

56. Charlotte Roueché, Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity, Journal of Roman Studies Monographs 5 (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1989), 46.

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Just as the innate superiority of a wellborn man was brought to its finest polish through paideia, so eunoia, unfailing goodwill to one’s hometown; euergesia, the urge to do good things for the city; and megalopsychia, a highminded zest for open-handed gestures of largesse, were held to run in the blood of a notable. A fifth-century mosaic from a great villa at Daphne, in the suburbs of Antioch, shows megalopsychia personified, with gold coins

streaming from her outstretched hand.57 Already on his wedding night, the young notable was sent to join his bride with the stirring admonition: “Go fight in a manner worthy of your fathers . . . so that you can provide children for the city, who will flourish in letters, in generosity, in charitable benefactions.”’58 Lavish spending was supposed to be a family tradition: notables “had their forebears as teachers of good-will towards the city. . . . For these men inherited their ancestral property by good fortune, and spend it freely by their generosity.”5°

7

Their wealth, then, was not a matter of good luck; still less could it “ »°*" spe

be said to rest on exploitation. It was wealth held “for the common benefit." It provided the opportunity to display the most desirable of personal qualities, an “innate high-mindedness” that would let no notable rest content until he had spent more on his city than had any of his peers and had ensured, by so doing, that his city was the envy of all others.® Preaching against vainglory in Antioch, the priest John Chrysostom (himself a pupil of Libanius’) conjured up the scene that was still regarded as the high moment of the career of an Antiochene notable: The theater is filling up, and all the people are sitting aloft presenting a splendid sight and composed of numberless faces. . . . You can see neither tiles nor stones but all is men’s bodies and faces. Then, as the benefactor who has brought them together enters in the sight of all, they stand up and as from a single mouth cry out. All with one voice call him protector and ruler of the city that they share in common, and stretch out their hands in salutation . . . they liken him to the greatest of rivers . . . they call him the Nile of gifts . . . and say that he in his lavish gifts is what the Ocean is among waters. ... What next? The great man bows to the crowd and in this way shows his regard for them. Then he sits down amid the congratulations of his admiring peers, each of whom prays that he himself may attain to the same eminence.®? 57. Patlagean, Pauvreté, 183. 58. Menander, Epideictica 2.406, 408, in Menander, ed. and trans. D. A. Russell and N. G. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 149, 151. 59. 60.

Libanius, Oratio 11.133-34 (I.480-81), trans. Downey, p. 667. Libanius, Oratio 11.133 (1.480), trans. Downey, p. 667.

61. 62.

Libanius, Oratio 11.138 (1.482), trans. Downey, pp. 667-68. John Chrysostom, De inani gloria 4-5, in Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later

Roman Empire, trans. M. L. W. Laistner, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1951),

87-88; A. M. Malingrey, ed., Jean Chrysostome: Sur la vaine gloire et l'éducation des enfants,

Sources chrétiennes 188 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1972), 74-79.

—°Y oY" \F

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What the notable was expected to give and to whom were clearly laid down by tradition. It was the city as a whole that received most benefactions. Public giving was intended to make the city a place of dazzling amenities, an oasis of apolausis, of civic “good cheer” and “delight,” sharply distinguished from the deprived conditions of the surrounding countryside. Hence there was persistent emphasis on maintaining the facades of public buildings, on the sheer sensuous delight of elaborate pools and fountains that brought clear water to the heart of sweltering Levantine cities, on the high ceremonies associated with the public games, and on the embellishment of the theaters and hippodromes in which such ceremonials took place. These were deliberately grandiose, distant, if impressive, gestures. They were designed to confirm the impression of an innate eunoia, of an ungrudging goodwill, on the part of the individual notables towards their city. The principal recipients of such giving were the démos, the citizen body in a strict, ancient sense. The démos did not cover all inhabitants in the

city. A notable was obliged only to his “fellow citizens.” For only they had been “nurtured” by the same city as himself. Though far less wealthy than their benefactors, the members of the démos of Antioch were solid,

married householders and the descendants of citizens.6 They were, indeed, just the sort of artisans and laborers whose deference Libanius had elicited by civility and patronage. The more prosperous of them, as headmen and members of guilds, were responsible for keeping order in the city’s neighborhoods.

’

It was crucial for the self-image of the traditional city that the démos should not consist only of the poor. Indeed, the exact opposite was the case. The homeless and destitute were excluded. The “Nile of gifts” fell on every class that had an active stake in the city, from the highest downwards, like water cascading over the cataracts of a mighty river. For the care for all classes in their city exercised by urban benefactors mirrored, and so validated, the vast care of the emperor himself for all classes within his empire.®

‘

The citizen body was no abstraction in late antiquity. It became a reality by assembling on frequent occasions in the great theaters and hippodromes that remained an enduring feature of late Roman urban life. The hippodrome of Antioch had room for 80,000 persons,© the theater of Ephesus, 63. 64. 65.

Patlagean, Pauvreté, 183; Expositio Totius Mundi, ed. Rougé, pp. 245-46. Libanius, Oratio 11.151 (1.486), trans. Downey, p. 669. This is clearly seen in Richard Gordon, “The Veil of Power: Emperors, Sacrificers

and Benefactors,” in Pagan Priests, ed. Mary Beard and John North (Ithaca, N-Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 220-30; see also Worrle, Stadt und Fest, 254.

66.

444-61.

John H. Humphrey, Roman Circuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),

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85

for 24,000.67 The theater of Aphrodisias in Caria held 8,000, the smaller odeon, 1,700, and the stadium beside the walls of the city, 30,000.68 These

gigantic meeting places would not always have been full. Those at major proviricial capitals had room for visitors from neighboring cities and, even, for the villagers of the region. Yet seated row upon row in this manner, the theater crowd was the city. It was at the theater that the Antiochenes made their wishes known to the governors by means of carefully orchestrated acclamations. Their occasional stony silence was enough to cause an unpopular governor to turn pale with anger and anxiety.®? Thus assembled, the démos was a diverse body. The inscriptions scratched ” on the benches in the theater and in the stadium of Aphrodisias make this plain. We find seats marked for “younger men,” for “Jews,” for “the elders of the Jews,” for the supporters of the Blue and Green racing factions, for the butchers, the tanners, the gardeners, and the goldsmiths.”° But it

was always a community of those who belonged. To be a member of the démos one had to come from a citizen family and, as the case of Aphrodisias now shows, one had to be a member of a recognized civic group. Urban amenities, even theaters, were likely to be open to all comers; but entitlement to other forms of gifts—most particularly entitlement to free or cheap food—required proof of identity.71 Those entitled could be trusted to police the distributions of food: the Roman plebs was notorious for “crying out” against outsiders of whatever class or region in times of shortage.72 The traditional representation of the city, therefore, was made up of rigidly defined components. Only a certain group, the core of the traditional com- » munity, considered themselves entitled to the gifts of the notables. Even in small cities, not all inhabitants were members of this group: much of ¥ the lower-class population was left unaccounted for. The gifts themselves were highly formalized and rather distant. In late Roman conditions, their quantity and frequency were seriously diminished. Higher taxation, and the large sums now required for the pursuit of office and status within the imperial system, meant that surplus wealth was no longer available 67.

Clive Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),

61. 68. 69. Antioch, 70.

Kenan T. Erim, Aphrodisias (New York: Facts on File, 1986), 79, 62, 68. Libanius, Oratio 41.3, 5 (III.296), 301-2); idem, Ep. 811.4 (X.734); Liebeschuetz, 211-19. Roueché, Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity, 218-26. See C. Roueché, Performers and

Partisans at Aphrodisias, Journal of Roman Studies Monographs 6 (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 1992). 71. R. J. Rowland, “The ‘Very Poor’ and the Grain Dole at Rome and Oxyrhynchus,” Zeitschrift fiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 21 (1976): 69-72. 72.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 14.6.19, 28.4.32; Ambrose, De officiis 3.45.

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/ for potential “nourishers” to spend on their city. Far from betraying an innate urge to show goodwill to their fellow citizens, the gestures required of civic notables, such as the upkeep of the public baths and the regular provision of games in the theater or hippodrome, were imposed upon them by the imperial government. Never, perhaps, as wholehearted as they claimed to be, acts of evergesia were now extorted from the wealthy like any other tax—and were as frequently evaded.” Y Nor did the notables have control over the impact of euergesia on the populace. The actual staging of the games ceased to be a purely local matter. It required constant imperial intervention. The cost of mobilizing wild animals and pedigreed racehorses from all over the empire had increased dramatically. It was only through collaboration with the imperial administration that games offered by members of the town council could take place at all.”4 They took place less often, and in fewer towns. The great hunting shows offered by one of the leading families of Antioch had to be postponed for as many as seven years.7> When such shows did happen, they were presented in such a way as to foster loyalty to the emperor and his representatives, and only indirectly to heighten the prestige of the resident upper classes of the city. Altogether, in the conditions of the fourth century, the economic power of the leading town councillors, and their consequent responsibility for the well-being of the city, was as blatant as ever previously. But now they were more often seen as scapegoats rather than as “nourishers.” Everyone sensed the dangers which the notables faced in their cities. The relations of the great Roman families with a potentially riotous plebs formed a major theme in the life of a fourth-century senator such as Symmachus: it is one of the few issues on which he spoke with feeling in his letters.76 The account of fourth-century Rome left by Ammianus Marcellinus contains memorable scenes of successful confrontation, in which the

urban prefect, frequently (though not invariably) a senator and a longestablished resident of the city, faced down potential disorder. Leontius drove slowly in his official coach through an omihous mob: “Seated in his carriage, with every appearance of confidence he scanned with keen eyes the faces of the crowd in their tiers.””7 The very sound of the rumble of the wheels of the prefect’s coach was supposed to inspire respect.78 73. A. Marcone, “Lallestimento dei giochi a Roma nel iv secolo d.C.,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, ser. 3, 11 (1981): 105-22.

74.

Brown, “Dalla ‘plebs romana’ alla ‘plebs Dei,’” 137.

75.

Paul Petit, Libanius et la vie municipale 4 Antioche au ive. siecle apres J.C. (Paris: P.

Geuthner, 1955), 129.

76. J. F. Matthews, ““The Letters of Symmachus,” in Latin Literature of the Fourth Century, ed. J. W. Binns (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 70-73. 77.

Ammianus

78.

Cassiodorus, Institutiones 1.5, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937),

Marcellinus, Res gestae 15.7.4.

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Others were forced to plead with the plebs. At a time of famine, the prefect Tertullus “held out his little sons to the wildly riotous populace . .. and said with tears: ‘Behold your fellow-citizens, who with you will

endure the same fate.’”79

These stories were told because they had a happy ending. They showed that some notables, at least, could still count on reserves of traditional def-

erence in their dealings with the lower classes. But neither Ammianus nor Libanius was confident that the traditional relation with the démos would inevitably prove effective. A notable from Beirut, known to Libanius, re-

fused to become prefect of Rome: he knew too much of the habitual tension between Senate and plebs to welcome such a post.8° A few incidents of violence were all that was needed to create an atmosphere of chilling anxiety. Of the lynching of one governor in Antioch at a time of famine in 354, Ammianus wrote, “After his wretched death each man saw in the

end of one person an image of his own peril.”’81 Libanius recalled the grisly incident some forty years later, as a warning to the town council.82 Yet as in eighteenth-century England, the “license of the crowd” was the price that the civic notables were prepared to pay for the relative autonomy of their cities.8 Even when rioting, the crowd was still their crowd. Its worst violence had taken the form of lynching, which in the famine of 354 at Antioch would not have happened if the Caesar Gallus had not virtually handed over the victim to the Antiochene mob.®4 The riots had not, within living memory, escalated into full-scale uprisings. Rioting took the form of “swift, evanescent direct action” against individual unpopular figures.®5 It usually reached its climax in attempts to torch the palaces of powerful residents.86 On one such occasion, Libanius remem-

bered looking out to see smoke rising from an unpopular town councillor’s mansion, as the man and his family withdrew, precipitately, to the hills.87 At times, popular violence even merged with the festive life of the city. In the heady nights of the Kalends of January, the “ranks of the city are overturned and renewed” (to use the words of a fifth-century Syriac poet).® 81. This referred to the monk’s fear of the dread approach of Christ at the Last Judgment. I owe this reference to the kindness of Dr. S. J. B. Barnish. 79. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 19.10.2-3. 80. Libanius, Ep. 391.14 (X.387).

81.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 14.7.6.

82.

Libanius,

83.

E. P: Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society,” Social History 3 (1978): 145.

Oratio 46.29 (III.393).

84. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 14.7.6. 85. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” 402; Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 27.3.4; see Symmachus, Epp. 1.44, 2.38, and Oratio 5.1, for the case of Symmachus. 86. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 14.7.6, 27.3.8; Ambrose, Ep 40.15. 87. Libanius, Oratio 1.103 (1.133), in Norman, Libanius’ Autobiography, 62. 88. Isaac of Antioch, Homily on the Night Vigil, line 17, in Homiliae S. Isaaci Syri An-

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Poverty and Power

Even the emperor could be mocked, as Julian had been, by wicked ditties sung in the streets during the festival.8? It was an occasion for the populace to assert its right to riot. In 384 the Kalends proved a dangerous time for Candidus, a notable held responsible for the food shortages of the preceding summer: “He sat at home and covered his face . . . all fear and trembling for his own palace, as a torrent of lads bore down upon it, torch in hand, calling upon him to disgorge what he had unjustly consumed.”9° It was, indeed, the tolerance with which such license was treated in the cities, and the relative ease with which outbursts of violence were defused,

that is the most striking feature of the urban life of the empire in the gen/ erations preceding the reign of Theodosius I.9! Civic notables and imperial administration alike accepted a looseness of authority in the cities that they Y would never have tolerated in the countryside. Urban food riots, clashes between competing religious groups, and, later, fights between rival circus factions were regarded with relative insouciance. They seemed to be part and parcel of the dazzling ambitio, the boisterous pride of life, associated v with big-city living.92 They were treated as very different phenomena from the unremitting, grim war on brigandage waged throughout the countryside of the eastern empire and the obscure but tenacious menace of the Bagaudae in rural Gaul and northern Spain.% Yet it was a strictly conditional tolerance. The notables might weather the occasional riot, but a more serious uprising, even if it did not lead to great loss of life or destruction of property, was a “governmental catastrophe” for them.9* They were held accountable for the disorder. After a riot against the Christians in Alexandria in 366, “many town-councillors were reduced to the last extreme of affliction” in the investigation that foltiocheni, ed. P. Bedjan, (Leipzig: O. Harassowitz,

1903); S. Landersdorfer, trans., Ausge-

wahlte Schriften der syrischen Dichter, Bibliothek der Kirchenvater (Munich: J. Kosel, 1913), 21g

89.

Maud W. Gleason, “Festive Satire: Julian’s Misopégon and the New Year at An-

tioch,” Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 108-14. 90.

Libanius, Oratio 1.230 (1.184), in Norman, Libanius’ Autobiography, 121.

91.

H. P. Kohns, Versorgungskrisen und Hungerrevolten in spatantiken Rom, Antiquitas

1.6 (Bonn: R. Habelt, 1961), 104-8; Lellia Cracco Ruggini, “Felix Temporum Reparatio,” in L’Eglise et lempire au ive. siecle, ed. A. Dihle, Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt 34 (Vandoeuvres: Fondation Hardt, 1989), 229.

92.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 27.3.14.

93.

Brent Shaw, “Bandits in the Roman Empire,” Past and Present 105 (1984): 3-52;

K. Hopwood, “Bandits, Elites and Rural Order,” in Patronage in Ancient Society, ed. A. Wallace-Hadrill (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), 171-87; J. Drinkwater,

“Patronage in Roman Gaul and the Problem of the Bagaudae,” in Patronage in Ancient Society, 189-204.

94.

W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1985), 191.

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89

lowed.°5 This was not all: a riot called into question the town council’s / ability to control the city. Once the civic notables could no longer vouch for the peace of the cities, their credibility with the imperial government was severely weakened. Lovers of the Poor

The peace of the cities, therefore, proved to be the Achilles’ heel of the traditional civic elites. By the end of the fourth century they were faced “\/

by a rival. The “universal way” of a religion that claimed to dispense with the advantages of paideia was not simply a cultural challenge. It took social ” , form: in the city itself, the organization of the Christian church touched | more people and was shown to generate a more effective level of deference than did the impressive, but relatively infrequent and somewhat distant, public appearances of the notables. Why this should have happened is a complex story that admits no simple answer. The privileges lavished on the Christian church by Constantine and Constantius II constituted a grandiose overture to the later position of the churches.%° The use of force against temples of the gods in the reign of Constantius II shows that some bishops already felt that they could act with impunity. Their violence, in itself, constituted a claim to

stand for the majority of the population of their cities.” Paradoxically, the frequent divisions of the Christians throughout the fourth century may have contributed more to the assertiveness of the churches in local society than did imperial favor and imperial connivance at isolated acts of violence. Late Roman cities were characterized by massive underemployment.%8 The ” many phases of the Arian controversy in the East and the Donatist schism in North Africa provided the inhabitants of these cities with endless occasions for argument and for confrontation. Educated Christians spoke, though not always with enthusiasm, of the involvement of all classes in

their quarrels: “If you ask about your change, the shopkeeper talks theology vv to you, on the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire the price of a loaf, the reply is: “The Father is greater and the Son is inferior’; and if you 95. Annick Martin and Micheline Albert, “Histoire Acéphale” et Index Syriaque des lettres festales d’Athanase d’Alexandrie, Sources chrétiennes 319 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1985), 268. 96. C. Pietri, Roma christiana, Bibliothéque des écoles frangaises d’Athénes et de Rome 224 (Rome: Palais Farnése, 1976), 1:77-96; idem, “La politique de Constance II: Un premier

“césaropapisme” ou imitatio Constantini?” in Dihle, L’Eglise et lempire, 140. 97. T. D. Barnes, “Christians and Pagans under Constantius,” in Dihle, L’Eglise et lempire, 324-27. 98. Patlagean, Pauvreté, 170.

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say, ‘Is the bath ready?’ the attendant affirms that the Son is of nothing.”’2) Christian controversies mobilized individual congregations of believers within each city, provoking, on occasions, major riots, 1° and frequent pro/ cessions and counterprocessions.!®! All over the empire, Christian factional-

ism led to a perceptible increase in the climate of violence.102 Whether violence was widespread or not, accusations of violence were a standard feature of Christian polemics against rival Christian groups. Ammianus Marcellinus understandably concluded that Christian groups behaved to each other “like wild beasts.”1%

//

Such sporadic violence, in itself, would hardly have commended the Chris-

tian churches to the authorities as guarantors of law and order in the cities. “But the violence betrayed the growth of local organizations able to mobiY lize and control large congregations. Rival churches competed by replicating the social services provided by their opponents. The bishop’s control of almsgiving, for instance, became a hotly contested issue. Almsgiving was Y used to secure support. Already in the third century Cyprian of Carthage had distributed funds for the poor in such a way as to reward only those who remained loyal to him.1% In the fourth century both Donatus, bishop of Carthage, and Athanasius of Alexandria complained that the authorities had taken away, or substituted, alms traditionally distributed by themselves to the loyal poor of their congregations.1°5 From services to the poor to new basilicas, the Christian presence was heightened by men in a hurry. 1% Each Christian group was anxious to leave a permanent mark on the city. In the same way, the most poignant statements on the unity and potential

comprehensiveness of the Christian church were made by preachers whose congregations were, in fact, in a minority among competing Christian fac-

tions. This was true both of Augustine, in an Africa where every city was divided between Donatists and Catholics, and of John Chrysostom, as priest

of the beleaguered “orthodox” community in Antioch.107 =A

99. 100. 101.

Gregory of Nyssa, De deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti: Patrologia Graeca 46:557. Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 2.13. Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 6.8; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 8.8.

102. Ramsay MacMullen, “The Historical Role of the Masses in Late Antiquity,” in Changes in the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 267-76. 103. 104.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 22.5.4. Cyprian, Ep 5.1.2, 12.2.2; see esp. G. W. Clarke, trans., The Letters of Saint

Cyprian, Ancient Christian Writers (New York: Newman Press, 1984), 1:163. 105. Optatus of Milevis, De schismate Donatistarum 3.3; see G. A. Cecconi, “Elemosina

e propaganda: Un’analisi della ‘Macariana persecutio’ nel III libro di Ottato di Milevi,” Revue des études augustiniennes 36 (1990): 42-66; Athanasius, Historia Arianorum

106.

61.2.

R.Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1983), 88-92.

107.

Peter Brown, Augustine ofHippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967),

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91

Imperial support and vigorous infighting go some way to account for the impact of Christian congregations on the cities of the fourth century. What is significant, however, is the manner in which the Christian bishops v

and clergy consistently presented their claims to prominence. This was based on the singling out for particular concern of a category of persons that had no place in the traditional model of the urban community. The bishop v was a “lover of the poor,” and the wealth of the church was the “wealth

of the poor”: “A bishop that loveth the poor, the same is rich, and the city and its district shall honor him.”108 Urban notables had presented themselves as standing at the head of anv entire social hierarchy, made up of all active participants in the life of the city. The Christian bishop, by contrast, erected his claim to authority over vi/ * a social void. The poor were defined as those who belonged to no urban grouping. The butchers and tanners of Aphrodisias in Caria might be humble persons, even impoverished by modern criteria; but by inscribing their names on the benches of the stadium and by sitting there as a clearly recognizable group through the long ceremonies that celebrated the prosperity and loyalty of their city, they staked out a claim to be considered members of the démos, of the traditional urban community.!° By contrast, in the opinion of Libanius, the poor had no place in the theater: outcasts without home or city could never be considered members of a citizen body. 11° If the poor had figured at all on civic occasions, it had been as actors in paradoxical gestures by the great that consciously mocked the traditional claim of citizens to be the exclusive recipients of gifts from civic benefactors. This happened in Rome around 335-340: Lampadius was a man who took it very ill if even his manner of spitting was not praised, on the ground that he did that also with greater skill than anyone else. . . . When this man, in his praetorship [that is, at the beginning of his career] gave magnificent games and made very rich largesses, being unable to endure the blustering of the plebs, who often urged that many things should be given [to the performers] . . . in order to show his generosity and his contempt for the mob, he summoned some beggars from the Vatican hill [a graveyard area occupied by beggars long before it became the site of the shrine of Saint Peter] and presented them with valuable gifts.1" 225; R. L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth

Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 16, 159. 108. Ps.-Athanasius, Canon 14, in The Canons ofAthanasius, ed. and trans. W. Reidel and W. E. Crum (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1973), 25-26. 109. Roueché, Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity, 225. 110.

Libanius, Oratio 41.11 (III.300).

111.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 27.3.5.

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Nor were the poor “nourished” by anyone. By not belonging to any social group, the poor remained untouched by the care lavished by the great on the city as a whole. Nothing makes this more plain than the crucial issue of entitlement to food, in the form either of free doles or foodstuffs

Y at reduced prices. As the supreme benefactors, the emperors made every effort to maintain the annona, the privileged food supply, of Rome, “their” city, of Constantinople, and, apparently, of other late Roman cities."!2 In

the later third and fourth centuries imperial measures continued to take the ancient, civic model of the urban community for granted. Whenever emperors gave gifts of food to individual cities, these were made to the citizen body as a whole, irrespective of whether they were rich or poor. Y Citizen status, not need, gave access to such grants. In late third-century Oxyrhynchus, for instance, Aurelius Melas could not even sign his name in Greek. Like two-thirds of his fellow citizens, Melas was illiterate.113 He

was evidently a humble person. But he did not receive his grain because he was poor; he did so because he was the son and the grandson of citizens of the “most glorious city of Oxyrhynchus . . . and now necessarily producing... the proof of my descent . . . I request that I too may share the gift of grain . . . in like manner with my equals.”!14 Only later, Christian sources show us the true poor of Oxyrhynchus, sleeping out on the porch of the main church through the cold desert night, so as not to miss their places in the Sunday distribution of food.115 This huddling mass of the destitute was not the world of Aurelius Melas. Many were countryfolk and “strangers,” refugees from the war-torn South. A rich Christian at Oxyrhynchus could provide as much as one thousand solidi per year for / the care of the poor—enough to support 250 families. But he provided these sums to monks, to beggars, and to refugees.116 He was not “nourishing” his city. Altogether, the poor had remained a blank on the notables’ map of the city. We should not exaggerate the hardheartedness of pagan attitudes towards the poor. It is misleading to speak of the “harsh climate” that characterized attitudes to the poor in a world where only the citizen counted.117 112.

J. M. Carrié, “Les distributions alimentaires dans les cités de lempire romain

tardif,” Mélanges de lécole frangaise de Rome: Antiquité 87 (1975): 995-1101; P. Herz, Studien zur romischen Wirtschafisgesetzgebung, Historia Einzelschrift 55 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1988), 208-337; Durliat, De la ville antique a la ville byzantine, 3-163 (Rome); 185-317 (Constan-

tinople); 326-34 (Alexandria); 351-81 (Antioch). 113. Kaster, Guardians of Language, 38. 114. 115.

116. p. 60. 117.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri 40, no. 2898 (London: British Academy, 1972), 46-47. F. Nau, “Histoire des solitaires d’Egypte,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 13 (1908): 282.

Richard Raabe, Petrus der Iberer (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1895), 61; Syriac text

Veyne, Le Pain et le Cirque, 58-59; idem, Bread and Circuses, 30-31.

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We simply do not know in sufficient detail how the destitute were cared for in the small, cohesive towns that were the norm in the Roman Medi-

terranean. It is possible, for instance, that as many destitute found shelter“ around the great temples in cities such as Antioch, and in more rural areas,

as would later gather in the courtyards of the Christian basilicas.118 In small Italian towns in the second and early third centuries, many lower-class residents may have been saved from destitution by the banqueting and distributions of largesse offered by the civic notables: in such cities, the poor existed, but they were held above the survival line by a network of institutions that still called them “citizens” and not “the poor.”!19 In the fourth century, however, the numbers of the poor seem to have” increased perceptibly in many East Roman cities. Population appears to have risen in the surrounding countryside.120 Immigration was increased’ by a tendency for the metropolitan cities to absorb the wealth and the population of lesser provincial centers.121 Not all such immigrants would have been destitute. But they were “poor” in the sense that they were strangers to the city. As in the “Home Towns” of nineteenth-century Germany, the larger cities, such as Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, were better able than

were small towns to absorb immigrants without having to face immediate conflicts over entitlement.122 Outsiders faced expulsion only at times of major food shortages. Yet the presence of so many newcomers eroded the “ sharp distinction between members of the démos, many of whom happened to be poor, and other members of the lower classes who, if not “poor” in the strict sense of being destitute, were vulnerable because, as strangers,

they were not full members of the démos. Such persons were anxious tow’ find a group to which to belong. They might look to other leaders and be grateful for other forms of gifts. Their presence in the city was a dis118.

Libanius, Oratio 2.30, 30.20 (1.248, III.98), in Norman, Libanius 2, 26, 118; F.

Nau, “Résumé de monographies syriaques,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 18 (1913): 385. Barsauma and his monks mingle with the crowd of beggars outside a large temple in Moab.

G. W. Bowersock, “The Mechanisms of Subversion in the Roman Provinces,” in Opposi-

tion et résistance a lempire d’'Auguste a Trajan, Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt 33 (Vandoeuvres: Fondation Hardt, 1987), 304-10. 119. S. Mrozek, Les distributions dargent et de nourriture dans les villes italiennes du Haut Empire romain, Collection Latomus 198 (Brussels: Latomus, 1987), 103-6. P. Garnsey, in

the Journal ofRoman Studies 79 (1989): 232, is less optimistic. 120. Patlagean, Pauvreté, 231-35; G. Tate, “La Syrie a l’époque byzantine,” in Archéologie et histoire de la Syrie II, ed. J. M. Dentzer and W. Orthmann (Saarbriicken: Saarbriicker

Driickerei, 1989), 107-9. 121. Santo Mazzarino, Aspetti sociali del quarto secolo (Roma: Bretschneider, 1951), 251-55.

122. 391-98.

W. Walker, German Home Towns (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971),

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quieting reminder of a larger, less manageable urban community than was the neat, traditional image presented by’a man such as Libanius. Preaching in Antioch, John Chrysostom spoke of the poor as making up one-tenth of the city’s population.1234t is a convincing statistic, similar to the level of destitution current in late medieval Paris.124 For ChrysosA tom, these poor belonged as if “to another city.”125 It was by stressing their relationship with the “other city” of the poor that the bishops projected a form of authority within the city that outflanked the traditional ‘ leadership of the notables quite as effectively as Christian admiration of the monks, the illiterate heroes of the desert, outflanked their claim to

esteem based upon a monopoly of paideia. For the poor stood for the width of the bishop’s range of concern. On the social map of the city, they marked the outermost boundary of the “universal way” associated with the Christian church, just as the bookless wisdom of the monks indicated a cultural desert that stretched far beyond the narrow confines of Greek paideia. A mystical link was held to bind the bishop to the poor of his city. This link passed through every rank of society, “bracketing,” as it were, the whole urban community from the

very top to the very bottom, as an all-embracing “people of God.” Rich man and beggar alike went down into the baptismal pool and crowded around the altar to receive the Eucharist.126 Even if it were still a minority, in the face of polytheists and Jews, a church that was seen to reach out to the distant fringe of society, as dramatically represented by the poor, had already established a prospective moral right to stand for the community as a whole. Y — Love of the poor also provided an acceptable raison d’étre for the growing wealth of the church. Here, the heightened symbolic role of the bishop as “lover of the poor” resolved a tension that had long existed within the Christian community itself, about who was the authorized giver of gifts within the community. Ideally, Christian almsgiving was not the exclusive province of the rich. For Jews and Christians alike, it was a pious action

that redeemed the sins of each believer, irrespective of his or her wealth.

Small sums of money would do. Like late Roman cavalry armor, made up of overlapping round scales, the “breastplate of righteousness” put on 123.

124.

John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum 66.3: Patrologia Graeca 58:630.

B. Geremek, The Margins ofSociety in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1987), 193-94.

125.

John Chrysostom, De elemosyna 1: Patrologia Graeca 51:261.

126. John Chrysostom, Baptismal catechism 2.13, ed. Wenger, p. 140; idem, Homiliae in I Cor. 10.1: Patrologia Graeca 51:247AB; Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, 175-76, 187.

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by the believer through almsgiving was made up of innumerable small coins, given frequently to the poor.127 In reality, each Christian household tended to provide for its own poor,

and the wealthiest families provided most. The house of a rich Christian could be imagined as a center of wealth and protection: “All the poor called Marcellus their patron, and his house was called the house of pil- | grims and of the poor.” 128 Care of the poor, therefore, was a potential cen-

trifugal force within the Christian community. It favored wealthy families and could bypass the bishop and clergy. It was by a massive gift of alms to the poor that the wealthy widow Lucilla secured the election of one > of her servants, Majorinus, as bishop of Carthage in 311.129 Tracts that describe the ideal order of a church enable us to measure the strength of the current towards a “privatization” of almsgiving, as this was perceived by bishops and clergy in the fourth century: “If any man should do something apart from the bishop, he does it in vain; for it shall not be accounted a good work. . . . For the bishop is well acquainted with those who are in affliction.”’130 Yet the taint of private wealth remained. One had only to enter a church in fourth-century northern Italy and elsewhere to see the manner in which private persons displayed their wealth within the Christian community. The shimmering mosaic floors of the new basilicas were divided up into sections, each one of which bore the name of a donor, of his family, or even portraits of donors.131 The civic ideal of euergesia, the ancient searchY

for personal fame through well-publicized giving, had entered the church in a peculiarly blatant form. It was essential that the increased wealth of the Christian church, made’

up as it was of innumerable private benefactions, should be presented as 127.

Baba Bathra 9a, in Babylonian Talmud, trans. M. Simon (London: Soncino Press,

1935), 45. The scales on the horse armor discovered at Dura Europos, now in the National Archaeological Museum at Damascus, are exactly the size of coins. 128. Acts of Peter 4, in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), 2:289. : 129. Augustine, Ad Catholicos Epistula 25.73; W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 21. 130.

Didascalia Apostolorum 9, ed. A. Védbus, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orien-

talium 402: Scriptores Syri 176 (Louvain: C.S.C.O.,

131.

1979), 100.

Lizzi, “Ambrose’s Contemporaries,” 164-65; idem, Vescovi e strutture ecclesiastiche,

141-45. I have seen similar panels, for instance, in the garden of the National Archaeological Museum at Damascus. See M. Piccirillo, I Mosaici di Giordania (Rome: Quasar, 1986), 68-69, 71, 82-83, 85, 204-5; idem, Madaba (Milan: Edizioni Paoline, 1989), 288-89,

for further donor portraits. I owe this information to the kindness of Priscilla Henderson of the Australian National University.

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the wealth of the Christian community as a whole. And this wealth could not be more effectively disjoined from its family-oriented connotations than when distributed to the nonpersons who huddled on the edge of the community. By melting down the church plate of Milan in order to ransom

A

prisoners of war in the distant Balkans, Ambrose of Milan, in fact, de-

stroyed the memory of those Christian families (supporters of his Arian predecessor) whose names would certainly have been engraved on the edges of the great silver patens and along the rims of the Eucharistic chalices.1%2 By being taken into the hands of the bishop, as the “wealth of the poor,” the wealth of the church became public wealth. It would be displayed by the bishop in a manner calculated to put all other groups to shame. “The property of the church consists of the support of the destitute. Let pagans enumerate how many captives the temples have ransomed, what doles they have given to the poor, to how many refugees they have provided living allowances.’’133 We do not know, region by region, what the Christian church actually = did for the poor in the cities of the later empire.434 What we do know, —~

from our evidence, is how the care of the poor became a dramatic com-

ponent of the Christian representation of the bishop’s authority in the community.

The activities of the bishop and clergy heightened the visibility of the poor.135 The buildings of the church replaced temples as spacious new gathering points for the needy. In Ancyra, for instance, “what is wont to happen in great cities occurred here too: for on the portico of the church there 132. Ambrose, De officiis 2.28.136-41; cf. Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 4.25. The bishop of Jerusalem was almost deposed on the accusation of a layman, whose gift to the altar,

in the form of a silk cloth, was sold by the bishop and later used as the robe of a famous actress. A generation later, Rabbula, bishop of Edessa, was dissuaded from such a sale

by those who had donated church plate for the souls of their relatives: Panegyric on Rabbula, in S. Ephraemi Syri, Rabbulae episcopi Edessensis, Balaei et aliorum gpera selecta, ed. J. J. Overbeck, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1865), 173.5-7. On such plate, see Marlia Mundell, Silver

from Early Byzantium: The Kaper Karaon and Related Treasures (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1986), 68-85. 133. Ambrose, Ep. 18.17.

134. C. Pietri, “Les pauvres et la pauvreté dans I’Italie de l’Empire chrétien,” in Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae 6, Bibliothéque de la Revue d’Histoire ecclésiastique 67 (Brussels: Nieuwelaarts, 1983), 267-300; K. Mentzou-Meimari, “Eparkhiaka evagé idrymata mekhri tou telous tés eikonomakhias,” Byzantina 11 (1982): 243-308; Judith Herrin, “Ideals of

Charity, Realities of Welfare: The Philanthropic Activity of the Byzantine Church,”in Church and People in Byzantium, ed. R. Morris (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, 1990), 151-64. 135. John Iliffe, The African Poor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 29, 42.

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was gathered a crowd of people, some married, some unmarried, lying there for their daily food.’”’136 Attracted to such centers, the poor rapidly came to be mobilized as part ““ of the “symbolic retinue” of the bishop. Their presence in the bishop’s following, along with that of monks and of consecrated virgins, symbolized | the unique texture of the bishop’s power. He was the protector to those persons who owed least to the traditional city, the unmarried and the

homeless.137 On the great feasts of the year, the poor were put on view, through processions and solemn banquets: “This word have we spoken concerning the poor: God hath established the bishop because of the feasts, that he may refresh them at the feasts.’138 These occasions may not, in fact, have significantly alleviated the state of the poor, but they carried a clear ceremonial message that was closely watched by contemporaries. Ambrose was accused by his enemies of having scattered gold pieces to the poor.!3? His gesture of almsgiving was’ presented by his enemies as the usurpation of an imperial prerogative. Only the emperor, a man raised by fortune above all concern for wealth, could shower gold, the most precious of all metals, on the populace.14° It is significant that ceremonial rivalry of this kind came to be tolerated in the fourth century. By being made visible, the poor were also made“ amenable to control. A potentially disruptive element on the margins of the great cities, the poor were enlisted to acclaim the bishop and the Christian rich with the same deferential fervor as that with which the démos acclaimed the civic notables. Their hands upraised in thanks in the court_yards of great churches now echoed in miniature the solemn scenes in the theater that bound the city to its benefactors.14! Compared with the “Nile of gifts” expected of a civic notable, the sums

involved on such occasions were minute. The elementary necessities of life— food, clothing, shelter, small coins, and, eventually, a decent burial—not

buildings and great games, were the gifts appropriate to the care of the poor.'42 But these outlays happened on a regular basis, and in a more frankly face-to-face manner than was the case with the high ceremonials of a no136. Palladius, Lausiac History, trans. R. T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers 34 (New York: Newman Press, 1964), 149. 137. Brown, Body and Society, 259-60. 138. Ps.-Athanasius, Canon 16, ed. Reidel and Crum, p. 27. 139.

Ambrose,

140. 141.

Justinian, Novella 105.2.1; Worrle, Stadt und Fest, 129, n. 296. Paulinus of Nola, Ep 13.11, 13-15.

142.

Sermo contra Auxentium

33.

Palladius, Dialogus de Vita Johannis Chrysostomi: Patrologia Graeca 47:22; Durliat,

De la ville antique a la ville byzantine, 552-58, 176.

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table’s euergesia. They offered a means of fostering goodwill, broken down into smaller units and displayed more frequently, for a trifle of the cost of civic munificence. Such care was considered necessary. The mobility of the lower classes preoccupied the emperors. In 382 the emperor Valentinian II legislated against vagrancy in Rome. The traditional solution, favored by the upperclass residents, was that all able-bodied beggars should become the slaves or the serfs (depending on their previous status) of those who denounced them / to the authorities.143 The Christian church offered a less-drastic way of stabilizing the population. It bore the cost of keeping the poor in one place. They were enrolled on the matricula, on poor rolls kept by the bishop and clergy. These rolls are referred to in cities as far apart as Hippo in North »